'' ' I I ^ 



THE MAN AND THE 

■™« MASTER 1 



FREEMAN 





Class _ELn3C- 
Book. E^ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



The Man and the Master 



JAMES E.^^FREEMAN 

Rector of St, Andrew* s Memorial Church, 
Tonkers, N. T. 

Author of '' If not the Saloon, What?'' 
and ** Themes in Verse " 



NEW YORK 

THOMAS WHITTAKER 
2 AND 3 Bible House 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Cdoies Received 

•JUL 16 1906 

vr, Cooyriffht Entry 






Copyright, 1906, 
By THOMAS WHITTAKER 






I / \ :; 



WASHl^iGION 



To my friend and beloved Bishops 

The Right Rev. HenVy C. Potter, D. D., LL. D. 

from whose' lips I have learned 
often of the Man and the Master 



Foreword 

The following pages, suggested by a series 
of sermons preached on this subject, are not 
designed to set forth in any chronological or- 
der the Life of the Master ; they simply deal 
with certain phases or aspects of that life and 
seek to lay emphasis upon its cardinal charac- 
teristics. To bring the divine life within the 
sphere of ordinary human intelligence is but to 
seek to accomplish and fulfil the Divine plan. 

That Christ sought to do this, is evident on 
every page of the Gospel story. Indeed it was 
His very effort in this direction that baffled 
and confounded His critics; that He could 
come within the limitations of our life, be par- 
taker with us of its conditions, experience its 
wants and its desires, feel its pangs and suffer its 
pains ; all this seemed to the Hebrew mind to 
unfit Him for Messiahship. We cannot but 
feel, that the more intimately we relate Christ 
to every interest of human life, yes, that the 
more completely we bring Him within the 

V 



VI FOEEWOEI> 

range of our own experience, the more fully 
do we grasp the rich significance of His per- 
fect character and the more really do we 
touch, in a sympathetic way, the greatness and 
power of His Saviourhood. That He felt His 
kinship with us, is evident in every action of 
His life and every utterance of His lips. 
Even after His resurrection He joined Himself 
to His disciples in an intimacy that is as 
touching as it is majestic. He ate with them 
at their morning meal and talked with them of 
those large issues that concerned the future of 
the great society He came to create. 

After His ascension, it was the passionate 
desire of these disciples to be so completely ab- 
sorbed into His life, that they might enter even 
into the fellowship of His sufferings. To re- 
incarnate Him, has ever been the longing de- 
sire of His children. To accomplish this we 
must bring His humanness within the range of 
our own experience. When we know the Man- 
Christ Jesus, we shall be able to comprehend 
the divinity of His perfect life. 

A distinguished writer has said that "no 
religion is complete without a relation to every 
department of life, and no department of life 



FOREWORD VU 

is complete without a relation to religion." 
We sincerely believe that when we have so in- 
timately related the Man and the Master, to 
every department of life that the reality of 
His presence is evident in all its several spheres 
of service, we shall have realized the full mean- 
ing of His incarnation. 

James E. Freeman. 

YonkerSy November^ 1905. 



Columbia University^ 

March 18th, 1905. 

Having had the opportunity of reading the 
manuscript of the following pages on "The 
Man and the Master," before publication, I feel 
sure, if I may be permitted as a layman to say 
so, that every one who reads these essays will 
receive a deeper and truer impression of Christ's 
presence in every-day life and of God's influence 
as exercised in the world through His Son. 

Throughout the essays the writer has em- 
phasized what the Anglo-Saxon Homilists of old 
called, the " menniscnys " of our Saviour, which 
the author has termed His humanness and in 
which he has succeeded in a remarkable way in 
bringing the Divine Experience nearer to our 
own. 

In the chapter on the Boyhood of the 
Master, one feels that he is walking with the 
youthful Jesus through the streets of Nazareth 
or over the hills blessed by His footsteps, and 
His youth with its sacred lessons becomes part 
of the life to-day. The Gospel of work illus- 
viii 



trated by Christ the carpenter is rich in sug- 
gestion for all who labor. I was particularly 
interested in Christ the Teacher, whose teaching 
so far transcends all other exponents of truth, 
Classical or Oriental, and I have studied them, 
as to make it easy to understand how the world 
is drawing daily nearer to Him. The chapter 
on the Divine Reformer is vivid in its portrayal 
of the way in which the newer rule succeeded 
the older law in the guidance of men's lives : 
the tender sympathy of Christ the Friend, the 
comforting assurance of Christ the Liberator, 
and the promise of eternal hope in Christ the 
Saviour, are all presented in such a manner as 
to make crystal clear the identity of human in- 
terests with the Divine. 

The breadth and scope of the descriptive 
sketches, the richness, variety and aptness of the 
illustrations, and above all the writer's attitude 
towards the entire subject, combine to add value 
to this picture of Him who before time began 
was the Saviour of Mankind. 

A. V. Williams Jackson. 



IX 



I 



Contents 



Jesus Christ — His Boyhood and Home 
Jesus Christ — The Workman 
Jesus Christ — The Teacher 
Jesus Christ — The Reformer 
Jesus Christ — The Friend 
Jesus Christ — The Liberator 
Jesus Christ — The Saviour 



19 
37 
55 
75 
93 
III 



JESUS CHRIST— HIS BOYHOOD 
AND HOME 



**No more venerable form has dawned npon the horizon 
of history than the person of Jesus Christ. The simple 
course of time has placed Him above all, leaving nothing 
visible that can approach Him. By the consent of all, even 
of those who do not believe in Him, Jesus Christ is a good 
man, a sage, an elect, an incomparable personage. He has 
done such great, such holy things, that even His enemies 
pay constant homage to His work and to His person.^* 

— Lacordaire. 

" Once in the world^s history was bom a man. Once in the 
roll of ages, out of innumerable failures, from the stock of 
human nature one bud developed itself into a faultless flower. 
One perf eot specimen of humanity has God exhibited on the 
earth," — Frederick W, Eobertaon, 



BOYHOOD AND HOME— THE 
DAWN OF DESTINY 

" How is it that ye sought Me ? wist ye not that I must be 
about My Father's business ? ' ' 

** And He went down with them and came to Nazareth, 
and was subject unto them."— St. Luke 2 : 49-51. 

AT the beginning of his singular story of 
the Life of Jesus, Ernest Kenan says : 
" The chief event in the world's history 
is the revolution by which the noblest portion of 
humanity passed from the ancient religions, 
comprised under the name Paganism, to a re- 
ligion based on a divine unity, and the incarna- 
tion of the Son of God." It is a strange and 
suggestive tribute to the place that Jesus of 
Nazareth occupies among all the world's great 
religious teachers, and coming as it does from 
so unexpected a source, it is bound to chal- 
lenge our attention. 

That the life of this Man of sorrows is com- 
manding a larger and deeper study to-day than 
ever before, and that the world is coming to a 
fuller apprehension of its vast meaning, is a 

3 



4 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

fact beyond all dispute. Jesus Christ is being 
studied afresh as the world's ideal type of the 
perfect Man, and through the study of His hu- 
manity we are conaing to a clearer vision of His 
Divinity. If He lived among His kinsmen in 
that far-away age and was without honor or 
preferment among His own countrymen, He 
is occupying to-day the central place in the 
world's horoscope. Not only is His philosophy 
and His splendid teaching exercising a larger 
sway over the hearts of men, but His blessed 
person. His faultless manhood is coming to be 
the focal point upon which the world's vision 
is fixed and its aspiration centred. Utilitarian 
and materialistic as the present period may 
be, it has placed a larger value upon the Man, 
Christ Jesus, than any that has gone before, 
and out of the closer study of His person and 
the more critical examination of His teach- 
ings, it is bound to come to a larger emulation 
of His life. 

The facts that bear upon the childhood of 
Jesus are few and scant, and yet they are suffi- 
cient to convey to us some impression of the 
early environment in which His youth and 
early manhood were passed. 



BOYHOOD AND HOME 5 

Nazareth may not rank with the cities and 
towns of the ancient world, there is little about 
the history of this unimportant place to com- 
mand our interest ; Jerusalem, Capernaum, and 
a number of other places outrank it as centres 
of commerce and learning; Eome and Athens 
overshadow it upon the page of history ; no 
one would have paused to study the incon- 
spicuous town with its provincial population, 
and yet it has become at length the very centre' 
and heart of the world's curious and reverent 
attention. 

Situated as it was, among the most southerly 
of the lime-stone hills of the Lebanon range, 
a City "set upon a hill," it had an eminence 
of sixteen hundred feet above the level of the 
sea. Although but three days, or eighty miles' 
journey by caravan from Jerusalem, it was 
sufficiently independent to have its own syna- 
gogue. It was here in this temple of worship 
that He declared Himself the fulfilment of 
Prophecy. The people of the place among 
whom Jesus grew up, might very properly be 
described as the Puritans among the Hebrew 
people; the Nazarite was the "consecrated 
one," a man of singular devotion, upon whom 



6 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

the strictest religious vows were imposed. 
Among these rigorists and in a home that was 
essentially strict in its discipline, Jesus w^s 
reared. What the effect of this home-environ- 
ment was, how He felt its constraining and 
restraining influence, how it affected His 
thought, life, and His conception of duty and 
obligation, is evident in the few active years 
of His public ministry. Provincial as the 
town was, it was nevertheless something of a 
cosmopolitan centre. Here, the traders from 
distant parts, Eomans, Greeks, Arabs and 
Phoenicians, came to barter and to sell. The 
influence of the mighty Roman Empire was 
felt and its severe yoke served to chafe and 
arouse the resentment of these simple village 
folk. Doubtless Christ had often heard in the 
market-place or even at His fireside, expres- 
sions of the contempt in which His own people 
held the autocratic power of Rome. The 
whole environment of Nazareth was one that 
must have filled Him with patriotic zeal 
and admiration for a people, that had hitherto 
been distinguished in the great field of action. 
The story of the heroism and genius of those 
great leaders, the Maccabees ; the oft-repeated 



BOYHOOD AND HOME 7 

tales of Israel's Shepherd-king and poet, David ; 
the never-fading records of her statesmen- 
prophets, all these found peculiar inspiration 
from the setting in which His life was cast. 
From Nazareth's hill He could overlook the 
plains on which the great Founder of the He- 
brew dynasty, Abraham, dwelt, when he was 
a stranger in a strange land, seeking for a city 
of permanence. Mount Carmel, the scene of 
the prophet Elijah's sacrifice and victory over 
the priests of Baal was not far distant, and a 
little beyond. He could descry the bald and 
barren mountain of Gilboa, that witnessed the 
last stand and defeat of Israel's first king, 
Saul. Within a day's journey He could reach 
the shores of the Sea of Galilee, where the 
villas of the Roman aristocracy abounded ; an- 
other day's pilgrimage would bring Him to a 
Mediterranean port where He might mingle 
with the peoples of all lands. That Jesus was 
familiar with all these environments of His 
home, that He talked with the trader from 
distant parts as w^ell as with the soldiers of the 
Roman legion, that He mused over the historic 
landscape or visited the scenes of His country's 
former triumphs and achievements, we may 



8 THE MAN AND THE MASTEE 

reasonably be assured. We like to think of 
His boyhood fancy being stirred by the tales 
of the historian or thrilled by these scenes 
of historic interest. That He was taught 
by His gentle mother, the Jewish catechism, 
that He learned the immortal Psalms of 
Israel's minstrel King, that He visited with 
consistent zeal and regularity the synagogue 
that stood hard by, that He worked as the 
son of a carpenter, all this but serves to 
emphasize His kinship with us. It is of far- 
reaching interest that this greatest of men 
should spend the maturing years of His life, 
thirty in all, amid the obscurities of a place, 
that was of all the parts of Palestine the most 
despised ; it furnishes another touch of the 
reality of His humanness. But in all this, He 
was following the ever-repeated tendency of 
all true genius. Great centres and cities are 
too sterile and barren, they are lacking in 
those fructifying and enriching qualities that 
contribute to and make for real greatness. 
Genius loves the haunts of nature, where only 
the whispers of the still-small voice are heard. 
Far from the great thronging crowd and amid 
the grandeurs of God's creations do they walk, 



BOYHOOD ATTD HOICB 9 

whose lives are splendid with the gifte ot 
genius. The child Jesos, subject to the dis- 
cipline and love of the home in Nazareth, un- 
recorded as that story is, must ever remain the 
reverent admiration of our imagination. 

When at last at twelve years of age He was 
taken for the first time to the great temple at 
Jerusalem, when for weeks His boyish im- 
agination was contemplating that long-looked 
for journey to the city of the great Bling, we 
may well conceive what His thoughts and 
aspirations were. When the day came that 
the family were to set forth, and during that 
slow progress towards the city, we can seem 
to see Him hastening on in eager anticipation 
to catch a first glimpse of the glistering marble 
of the rich Herodian temple that crowned the 
hiU of Zion ; and when at last He saw the 
glittering gold and the stately marble col- 
onnade of the far-famed building, how His 
heart must have leaped with joy to be within 
its courts and to stand before its historic altars. 
Little did the people of that great city know, 
that there was approaching it that day one, 
who was to be its Master and its King. 
There is little wonder that, amid the surging 



10 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

multitude the child became detached from His 
kinsmen, it is still less remarkable that He 
should have sought the courts where the 
learned doctors of the law were to be found. 
Here this prodigy from Nazareth awoke the 
curious interest of the interpreters of the 
Sacred Books; His questions and answers 
alarmed and confused them, they found them- 
selves face to face with a new system and a 
new and Eternal Witness. It was amid such 
surroundings, that His mother and His father 
found Him. Filled with a natural astonish- 
ment, coupled with a touch of parental anx- 
iety, the gentle Mary rebuked Him for His ap- 
parent indifference : " Son, why hast Thou thus 
dealt with us ? behold. Thy father and I have 
sought Thee sorrowing." The sense of 
maternal solicitude, the expression of deep 
anxiety, the mark of authority, all this is 
evident in the mother's plea. That Mary was 
conscious of the awful majesty of the child of 
her simple home, that she knew that one day 
the tender ties must be broken and the boy 
assert His inalienable rights and take His 
large place among the teachers of men, aye, 
that He must rise to the full dignity of His 



BOYHOOD AND HOME 11 

Saviourhood, all this we may believe the 
gentle mother had kept and pondered in her 
heart. But surely it must have seemed to 
her, that the time for this self -asserting was 
not at hand ; with what tenderness she reached 
out to save the child of her deepest love from 
the awfulness of the great task to which He 
was committed ; come it must, but surely not 
at this tender age. The touch of a true ma- 
ternal love is here, the deep instinct of a 
woman's heart that forecasts the future, is 
evident in Mary's tender plea. 

What a startling revelation of conscious 
power marks the reply of the hitherto 
tractable youth — " Wist ye not that I must be 
about My Father's business ? " It would al- 
most seem that suddenly, there had dawned 
in all its fulness upon the mind of the boy 
Jesus, the greatness of His destiny ; that, 
within the temple precincts there had flashed 
upon His vision the mighty tasks to which He 
was committed. In one single utterance, the 
child sums up the all-consuming business of 
His life. 

The greatest crisis comes, when the light of 
destiny dawns ; when in the fulness of a com- 



12 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

plete consciousness we rise to the supreme 
business of life. That Jesus was fully con- 
scious of the career that lay before Him, that 
He saw the whole of the service which His 
Father had commissioned Him to do, even at 
this early age, we are compelled to believe. 
" My meat is to do the will of Him that sent 
Me," is the guiding principle of His whole 
career. From His first public appearance at 
twelve years of age, down to the last day 
upon the cross, He never swerved from the 
path that lay so clearly before Him. 

We conceive that the lesson of His childish 
lips is as important to a right conception and 
service of life, as the later utterances of His 
mature manhood. To get at life's perspective 
at the right time^ to see the great purpose and 
object of living, to know one's place in the 
vast mechanism of time and eternity, to be- 
lieve that we are essential parts in the infinite 
scheme of God's order, this means to give life, 
not only definiteness of purpose, but the will 
and the inspiration to fulfil it. 

We are told that, as Pompey, the Koman 
Emperor, passed out of the gates of Athens, 
he saw carved upon a column this inscription, 



BOYHOOD AND HOME 13 

"But know thyself a man and be a God." 
There was a deep philosophy in the legend, 
and a principle that makes for the best and 
largest life. To come to our service, no 
matter where it may be, with the conscious- 
ness that we are destined to something, that 
we have a commission to he something ; this 
is to give life, not only definiteness, but in- 
spiration. The humanness of Christ's boy- 
hood, the simple narrative of His early life, is 
of transcendent importance to the man of 
conscious ideals. 

In a world of objectless lives, in the face 
of so much that seems to witness to failure, 
amid all the desultory tendencies of modern 
times, what an example the Boyhood of the 
Master furnishes. What cared He, though 
learned Eabbis with their parchments sought 
in vain for the prophecy of His coming? 
What cared He, though Herod and the Eoman 
government conspired to make His way a path 
of thorns and the end a lonely cross ? He had 
His Father's business to perform, He had the 
certitude of divine favor. He had the assurance 
of a definite object, — He must, in the face of 
all things, be about His Father's business. 



14 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

Oh, for a life that has its conscious realization 
of a divinely ordered and planned occupation, 
a life that is not the victim of the world's ca- 
prices, that lives beyond the influence of en- 
vironment or local tendency. Pope grasped 
this thought in his verse 

** AH are but parts of one stupendous whole 
Whose body nature is, and God the soul/' 

To Tcnow that we are of God, and that in His 
great order we fill an essential part, that we 
are not, as Huxley maintained, chessmen on 
the board of human fate, but that we came 
here with a great plan back of us in which we 
play a part, is not this to make life something 
more than a period of mere acquisition of 
knowledge, or wealth, or power ? These are, 
after all, but incidents in the outworking of 
the plan, there is something larger and better 
and nobler, in the whole scheme ; we have a 
divinely ordered destiny to reach. Again, 
what a power and force life takes on when 
once it has come to this high consciousness of 
its purpose. The obstacles that once threatened 
to overcome and destroy it, seem to lose their 
terror ; we are armed with a zeal and a power 



BOYHOOD AND HOME 15 

of resistance that nothing can overcome. 
Show us the man or the woman that is con- 
scious of God's plan concerning them, and we 
will show you a personality that is absolutely 
invincible. 

True, there may be much that the world 
calls " failure " about such a career ; there was, 
about the life of Jesus Christ, but a cross 
cannot crucify such an one. It was a mighty 
testimony that the startled Eoman soldier bore 
to the dying Christ upon the cross — " Truly 
this was the Son of God." He was uttering 
the conviction of the ages. If Jesus Christ is 
the type of all true life, then His Father's 
business is the business of all humanity. He 
came to accentuate this great thought ; life 
had lost its objective ; men were striving for 
something that was altogether beneath them ; 
to be satisfied with mere trifles that were 
utterly ephemeral in their character. To 
live without plan or purpose, or the thought 
that there was a great " divine event towards 
which the whole creation moved," was to 
render life empty, and to rob it of its highest 
and truest satisfactions. What a majesty there 
fe in the conception that somehow, we are 



16 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

incorporated in one great and world em- 
bracing scheme with the Eternal Father, and 
that His great ends demand our service. The 
world's supremest business is to know and 
love God, and whoever contributes to this 
great end is in partnership with the Eternal. 
We take it, that to interpret in some way the 
life and power of God, is to give life its largest 
fulfilment. 

What a deep significance there is in the 
words, " there was a man sent from God," 
which were written concerning John : what a 
thought that, back of life there is the com- 
pelling power and energy of God. When once 
we have caught this lofty conception of our 
purpose here, when once the real interpreta- 
tion of life comes to us, and we rise from our 
self-contemplation to the realization of our 
oneness with God in the concerns of His 
eternal business, how all life takes on a new 
aspect. Is not this the lesson which the Boy 
Christ of the temple teaches ? 

It was this new aspect that changed the 
whole tenor of Paul's life and gave such pos- 
itiveness to his career. Did failure, and want, 
and suffering, and martyrdom mark it ; could 



BOYHOOD AND HOME 17 

not his enemies say that they had made an end 
of his missionary work ? Yes : but while they 
were rejoicing over his apparent defeat, he 
was writing to his son Timothy from his 
prison at Eome, " I have fought a good fight, 
I have finished my course, I have kept the 
faith." 

He had served his Master well, and the 
crown of rejoicing was assured. The guar- 
antee of ultimate success is the assurance of 
the disciple who will be about his Father's 
business. 

Armed with this consciousness, what can ar- 
rest the man or woman, no matter what their 
sphere of action may be, in the highest and 
noblest fulfilment of being? Jesus Christ is 
no isolated example, impossible of imitation. 
He is a type to which all may aspire. Every 
great or small disciple that has left his or her 
mark upon time, has been inspired by the same 
motive and desire that moved Him. Every 
messenger, in the pulpit and out of it, that has 
moved men to a larger consciousness of life's 
real purpose and object, has been consumed 
with this thought of oneness with the Father. 
Nothing is more pervasive or persuasive, than 



18 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

the influence of such an one ; Emerson had this 
thought in mind when he wrote : " all men are 
commanded by the saint " ; not a sainthood that 
repels, but a sainthood that attracts : not a 
sainthood that is selfishly exclusive, but a saint- 
hood that is heroically inclusive : not a life that 
is less human, but that is more completely 
divine: not less of manhood, but more of 
Saviourhood. Into this true and lofty concep- 
tion of life's real purpose may He lead us, un- 
til the business of the Eternal Father becomes 
the business of all men, and life finds its 
noblest fulfilment in the service of Him whose 
controlling thought was, — " My meat is to do 
the will of Him that sent Me." 



JESUS CHRIST— THE WOEKMAN 



** The Savionr of men never conferred a greater temporal 
boon on mankind than by ennobling and sanctifying manual 
labor, and by rescuing it from the stigma of degradation 
which had been branded upon it. The primeval curse at- 
tached to labor is obliterated by the toilsome life of Jesus 
Christ. If the profession of a general, a jurist and a states- 
man is adorned by the example of a Washington, a Taney 
and a Burke, how much more is the character of a workman 
ennobled by the example of the Master." 

— Cardinal Gibbons. 



JESUS CHEIST— THE WOEKMAN 

" Is not this the carpenter ? ''— St. Mark 6 ; 3. 

THIS was the critical comment of the 
neighbors of Nazareth when their fel- 
low townsman, Jesus Christ, under- 
took to teach them in the place of public wor- 
ship. " From whence hath this man these 
things ? " It is evident that the Christ had 
awed and fascinated them, for a time at least, 
by the beauty and wisdom of His words and 
the intensity of His deep sincerity ; but it was 
only for a moment, and then this sad comment, 
"He could there do no mighty work," the 
prophet was not without honor, save in His 
own country and among His own brethren. 
The man who had plied His craft day by day 
among them, they could not and would not ac- 
cept as their teacher. They had not yet 
learned that the " highest dignity of thought 
is consonant with the greatest humility of cir- 
cumstance." It was no mere accident that 
Jesus was a carpenter ; every Hebrew lad had 
to learn a trade, and it was in part for this that 

21 



22 THE MAIT AT^D THE MASTER 

the Eoman despised them as a people. Christ 
entered into the fulness of our life's experi- 
ences, He passed over the same paths and 
through the same trials that His sympathy- 
might be coterminous with every phase and 
characteristic of human life. 

If the finer inspiration of the immortal 
poetry of David came out of the lowly life of 
the shepherd, then we may venture to believe 
that Jesus as a workman, wrought out much 
of the power of His great system. But quite 
aside from anything that His artisan career 
may have brought to His teaching as a phi- 
losopher, it lent to it all, that touch of human- 
ness that has made it synchronous with every 
phase of human life the world over. There is 
a language which is of a universal character, 
that finds its text-book, not in the class room, 
but at the workman's bench. We all under- 
stand the language of the toiler, there is a 
commonness about work that makes us all kin. 
Paul as a tent-maker, makes a stronger appeal 
to us, even though his teaching and philosophy 
have the quality of a refined scholasticism 
about them, than he could possibly have done, 
did he not labor at the trade that made him 



JESUS CHRIST — THE WORKMAN 23 

independent of all men. How far from the 
world's general conception of Him, was the real 
Christ. Art and poetry have been busy for 
centuries, spinning webs of fictitious fancy 
about His sacred person ; much as they have 
both contributed to render beautiful His life, 
they have in no small way made Him remote 
from the common life of the world's people. 
We believe Jesus of Nazareth to have been a 
rugged, strong, virile toiler, in the great work- 
house of service. We conceive of Him as 
prosecuting His daily tasks with all the in- 
tensity that characterized His later ministry. 
We believe that there was nothing of the 
ascetic about Him, nothing that suggested in 
any way His sepai^ateness from those with 
whom He plied His daily occupation. He 
stands as the simple peasant, the lowly work- 
man, the world's master, in the humble en- 
vironment of Nazareth. In this He is not un- 
like all the masters and geniuses of Time. A 
simple environment, a period of rugged toil, a 
life spent close to the heart of the people, 
these are the prerequisites of mastership. It 
is a homely but indisputable fact, that, a cer- 
tain kind of adversity (if adversity it may be 



24 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

called), seems to be necessary to the proper 
development of those qualities that make for 
genius. As there are no Royal roads to learn- 
ing, so there are no Royal roads to genius. 
Jesus Christ pursued no ways that differentiate 
Him from other men, and the nearer we keep 
to this fact concerning Him, the truer will be 
our interpretation of His life. 

The Master who, as the great French phi- 
losopher said, " lifted the gates of empire from 
their hinges and turned the streams of centu- 
ries from their courses," was a workman in 
the field of the world's action ; and with rev- 
erence we say it. He came to His place of 
supremacy as the world's Redeemer and 
Saviour, by ways that are so human in their 
character, that all men in every sphere and in 
every clime recognize in Him, that which as- 
serts His oneness with our common life. The 
first suggestion which His career as a work- 
man forces upon us, is, that the true means of 
development are not constituted or affected by 
environment or circumstance : some of the 
fairest flowers grow under the overshadowing 
branches of the densest wood, some of the 
rarest jewels come to their crystallization in 



JESUS CHEIST — THE WORKMAN 25 

the deepest mine. A barren and apparently 
unproductive soil under the irrigating proc- 
esses of God's enrichment sends forth the 
finest grains. Blindness did not hinder the 
vision of a Milton, deafness did not blunt the 
finer sensibilities of a Beethoven, a prison cell 
produces the immortal allegory of a Bunyan, 
banishment and a friendless environment 
wrought out the Divine Comedy of a Dante. 

Genius knows no limitations of time or place, 
and even persecution, like the harrow, is often- 
times the means of a greater productiveness. 

Again, isolation or that form of asceticism 
that characterized so much of the life of the 
church at a certain period, is not the Divine 
method of life's largest fulfilment. Great as 
was John the Baptizer, his was not the life 
that woos the world ; his wilderness vigil, long 
and unbroken, may have something in it that 
fascinates the Metropolitan crowds from Jeru- 
salem, but it is largely the fascination of curi- 
osity ; Jesus by the closeness of His contact, 
by the warmth of His fellowship, by the depth 
of His attachment, makes Himself the brother 
of every man. That He knew the life of the 
people of His town, that He was in touch with 



26 THE MAIT AND THE MASTER 

all that had to do with the interests of the oc- 
cupation with which He was identified, we 
may surely believe. Isolation chills the springs 
of sympathy and makes unreal the expressions 
of affection. To know a people we must live 
close to their common interests ; this He did, 
and it was the very environment from whence 
His truth drew its largest and most compre- 
hensive utterances. One of the most menacing 
dangers of our modern complex life, is its 
tendency to segregate men into parties and 
classes. 

The domination of any particular class in 
this world of persistent contacts, has been the 
cause of an immense deal of strife, disorder 
and revolution. The CoUonas in one period 
produce a Eienzi, and in another a Kobespierre. 
The carpenter of Nazareth, by His whole teach- 
ing and life, is appealing to our modern times 
for the recognition of the integrity of our 
common human interests. The law of unity is 
writ large on every order of God's creation ; 
to disturb that law means to violate a funda- 
mental condition of well-being, and to insure 
disaster. He who seeks to emphasize life 
unities, is a conserver of peace ; he who makes 



JESUS CHRIST — THE WORKMAN 27 

bold to sever by divorce a unity that has been 
of divine ordering, is a violator of God's law 
and a destroyer of human happiness. The 
very selection by Christ of the role of the 
workman, is suggestive of His desire to em- 
phasize the intimacy between the high and the 
lowly, aye, to make evident His recognition of 
a law, wherein occupation can make no dis- 
tinctions or discriminations. We submit, that 
Jesus as a workman discloses a wide variance 
between His conception and our practice in 
life. If He had been only the tractable child, 
if He had been only the splendid Teacher, if 
He had been but the stern Reformer, yes, if 
He had been but the uncomplaining Martyr ; 
He could not have been the world's sublime 
Master. 

It is the very humility of this divine life in 
its lowly service, the acceptance of a sphere of 
action that is universally common, that brings 
Him within the ken of all men. While it was 
this very humbleness of occupation that con- 
founded the Jews, it is this that lifts Him to 
the place of universal favor. TJie large con- 
cerns of the world are with the people who 
work. It is not some exclusive and favored 



28 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

few, who by circumstance and training are re- 
moved from tlie throbbing centres of human 
interest, it is not the mere scholastic sur- 
rounded with his folios of splendid thought, it 
is not the philosopher spinning out his theories, 
all too often impractical, that exercises a large 
and dominant control over human thought and 
action : it is the man or woman whose career 
impinges upon those concerns that have to do 
with a common experience, that moulds and 
shapes the destinies of individuals and com- 
munities and states. Such an one was this 
worker in the world's great vineyard of service, 
Jesus Christ. 

Might He not have selected some other 
career through which to bring to men His 
great teachings? Was there not some other 
role more befitting One upon whose heart and 
mind such weighty tasks devolved ? Not if 
He were to reach all classes and conditions of 
men the world over. There is but one life 
that reaches out to the outmost boundaries of 
human society, and that is the simple life: 
when we get beyond the pale of those primary 
and fundamental things that, because they are 
common, are universally understood, we have 



JESITS CHRIST — THE WORKMATE 29 

spoken in a language comprehended only by 
the few. If we are to get closer to the life of 
the world, if we are to interpret to it the life 
of the Christ, then it will only be through the 
simple life of Him who was the Carpenter of 
Nazareth. What an incomparable example 
and ideal He furnishes to those who are sin- 
cerely and conscientiously seeking to ameliorate 
the hard and exacting conditions in the great 
industrial world of our time. 

A second suggestion which this phase of the 
life of Christ presents, emphasizes the true 
dignity and place of labor in the formation of 
character. The disciplinary part of life is that 
which relates to its service. In the great hive 
of God's industry there are no places for the 
drones. From that early Eden day when God 
sent man forth to till the ground, down to the 
latest hour, He has brought human life to its 
best and truest fulfilment through the exercise 
of its gifts. A life that is unoccupied, that is 
freed by its privileges or riches from a real, 
active service, is a danger to itself and a 
menace to the community. The dusty paths 
of labor are the true highways to all real and 
permanent progress. If idleness is the curse of 



30 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

a people, then occupation is its saviour. Work 
makes character, idleness is the art of fools. 

James Russell Lowell has said, " No man is 
born into this world whose work is not born 
with him ; there is always work, and tools to 
work withal for those who will; and blessed are 
the horny hands of toil." This gospel of work 
was enunciated and practiced by the Carpen- 
ter of Nazareth. When we conceive of work 
as designed for the mere getting of something, 
for the acquisition of the requisites of life, we 
have reduced it to a low plane. It was not 
for these things that Christ labored ; He fol- 
lowed His daily occupation because it was in 
consonance with His whole teaching. Work 
is not money -getting, it is world-hettering : it 
is not drudgery, it is discipline : without it we 
rust. Every period of history that has wit- 
nessed to a larger development of manhood 
and womanhood has been characterized by an 
intense and virile service. As oxygen to the 
lungs so is work to character. Even salvation 
itself is not attained through some weak and 
languid and insipid kind of faith ; emotional- 
ism is not righteousness ; worship in itself, 
apart from action, is not the heart of Chris- 



JESUS CHRIST — THE WORKMAN 31 

tianity. Faith plus works, is the dictum of 
the Christ. To work out in some active and 
exacting way that taxes our energy mental and 
physical, our own salvation ; this was the con- 
cept of the early church. That our occupation 
is in some intimate way related to our salva- 
tion, that it has to do with the making of our 
character, we are bound to maintain. How 
we lift up to its proper and highest sphere, 
life's occupation, when we get Christ's point 
of view. A day well spent in the busy centres 
of life, is a contribution not only to our own 
enrichment, but to the bettering of the world 
at large. Work and religion are intimately 
related, the one is sanctioned by the other, 
nay is dependent on the other. A splendid 
painter has a masterful conception of Christ, 
in which he portrays Him at the close of a 
day's toil standing in the doorway of His 
home with outstretched arms, with the 
evidence of fatigue written upon every 
feature. The shadow of His form cast upon 
the floor of the humble cottage describes the 
lines of a cross; it is the prophecy of His 
great trial. 

What a suggestion it conveys of the relation 



32 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

of His life as a carpenter to His life as a 
Saviour, the golden threads of service run 
through it all. His very fatigue as a worker 
makes His salvation more grateful to the 
world ; for back of the utterances that are the 
very footing-stones of our faith, stands the 
Man of real experience, who knew the hard, 
beaten road of industry. Here our ways 
seem to converge and meet and the Divine 
enters into the human. Eighteen years of un- 
recorded action, and yet what an inspiration 
they furnish to the world's toiler. What a 
deep and tender sympathy that borders on 
kinship they present. If into our several 
occupations we could but bring the permanent 
consciousness of His sympathetic presence, if 
we could but prosecute our tasks, whether 
they be high or low, with the assurance that 
through these commoner things we are coming 
to our more perfect life, what a new meaning 
they would take on. 

Or if again, we could but bring to these 
tasks the spirit He brought, if we could infuse 
into our obligations to others who may be in 
some way related to us in our service, the 
sense of brotherhood and fellowship that 



JESUS CHRIST — THE WORKMAN 33 

marked His life of toil, what a panacea we 
would furnish for many of the weak spots in 
our great room of industry. After all, will we 
ever disclose any other method of solution for 
those great and anxious problems that threaten 
our peace, except through the teachings and 
practice of this life ? The very fact that this 
age is peculiarly one of commercial enterprise, 
makes it all the more imperative that a God 
who is a Son of industry should control it. 
Jesus Christ, the Carpenter of Nazareth, is 
speaking to His world to-day as He has never 
spoken to it before, and the very complexity 
of its problems makes it needful that His 
voice should be heard. No, it is no insignifi- 
cant fact that His own townsmen said of Him, 
" Is not this the carpenter ? " Nor is it a fact 
of inconsiderable importance that He was a 
toiler as well as a teacher and Redeemer : we 
want Him to-day in the simple garb of the 
workman as well as in the resplendent robe of 
the ascended Saviour. We need His presence 
in all the teeming marts of trade, we want His 
sacred person in all the great centres of in- 
dustry ; we have a crying need for the Work- 
man of Nazareth in those places where the 



34 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

atmosphere of toil is heavy with the enervat- 
ing miasma of greed and selfishness. Yes, we 
want in a world that is tired and worn with 
competitions and strifes, the presence of this 
Master and lover of men. If into the field of 
carnage and strife we pray for the advent of 
the Son of Peace, then into that far wider 
field of action, strewn with the tired forms 
and exhausted figures of a vast army of men 
and women, who are struggling for the barest 
needs of subsistence, we need to pray for the 
return of that simple form whose lowly oc- 
cupation relates Him to every concern of life. 
Oh, it is not some figure made remote by our 
Sunday worship of it, it is not some Christ of 
portraiture or marble, it is not some Saviour 
of theology or creed; it is a living, acting, 
realized Master that the world is yearning 
for ; a workman laboring with us where life is 
tense and its disciplines hard, that we need 
and must have. 

How shall we realize this ideal of His ever 
virile life ? Only by seeking to reincarnate it in 
our every-day tasks. Men want Him realized 
in us, they are asking us, not for our creed- 
hood, but for our Christhood. 



JESUS CHEIST — THE WOEKMAN 35 

A Christ of the common people and hence of 
all people, a Christ who touches through your 
hand and mine the life of men where they 
need it most; this is a Christianity that is more 
magnetic and powerful than anything we have 
yet realized and we believe it is to be the 
Christianity of the twentieth century. Is it 
not such a real, living Christ as this that 
Browning describes in his noble lines, 

** ^Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for ! 

My flesh that I seek 
In the Godhead ! I seek and I find it. O Saul it shaU be 
A face like my face that receives thee; a man like to me, 
Thou shalt love and be loved by forever; a hand like this 

hand 
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee ! 

See the Christ stand I '' 



JESUS CHRIST— THE TEACHER 



*' The Christian religion, of all the religions that ever ex- 
isted, is the most humane, the most favorable to liberty 
and to the arts and sciences : the modern world is indebted 
to it for every improvement from agriculture to the ab- 
stract sciences, from the hospitals for the reception of the 
unfortunate to the temples reared by the Michael Angelos 
and embellished by the Kaphaels. It v^as necessary to 
prove that nothing is more divine than its morality, nothing 
more lovely and sublime than its tenets, its doctrine and its 
worship : that it encourages genius, corrects the taste, de- 
velops the virtuous passions, imparts energy to the ideas, 
presents noble images to the writer, and perfect models to 
the artist ; that there is no disgrace in being believers with 
Newton and Bossuet, with Pascal and Kacine. ^ ' 

— Chateaubriand, 

" I believe that Christianity is the highest form of re- 
ligion that has ever been founded in this world/* 

Wu Ting-Fang J Chinese Minister, 

** Religion is not a method, it is a life, a higher and super- 
natural life, mystical in its roots and practical in its fruits, 
a communion with God, a calm and deep enthusiasm, a 
love which radiates, a force which acts, a happiness which 
overflows. * * — Amiel, 



JESUS CHRIST— THE TEACHER 

"Never man spake like this man/^ — St. John 7 : 46. 
**He taught them as one having authority. ' ^ — St. Mat- 
thew 7 : 29. 

FROM His first utterances in the Temple 
at twelve years of age, Christ as- 
tonished men by His remarkable 
teaching. To Nicodemus, who sought Him as 
a great Teacher, He was so overpowering and 
supernatural, that this " Master in Israel" cried 
out of his confusion : " How can these things 
be?" To the Samaritan woman by Jacob's 
well He was such a deep, subtle revealer of 
character, that she hastened home to her 
friends saying, " come and see a man that told 
me all things that ever I did, is not this the 
Christ ? " When the Pharisees sent officers 
to take Him, His speech was so powerful and 
irresistible that they returned saying, " Never 
man spake like this man." And when again 
He taught the people by parable, so striking 
was His utterance that they declared that, 
" He taught them as one having authority and 

39 



40 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

not as the Scribes." The surprise of the 
schoolmen was, that He who had never re- 
ceived the necessary training or discipline 
could speak with such power. They used logic 
and invective to confuse Him ; they asked Him 
cunning and crafty questions relating to state 
and ecclesiastical polity, seeking to entangle 
and entrap Him, but He baffled them at every 
point. A perfect strategist in the art of 
debate was the Christ. His sermon on the 
mount is the incomparable message of all 
ages and constitutes the basis of His great 
philosophy and system. A comparison has 
often been instituted between Christ and 
Socrates, and in many respects the two bear 
as teachers, a striking resemblance to each 
other ; neither of them wrote, both cultivated 
disciples, both taught the philosophy of unself- 
ishness, both emphasized the truth of life's 
immortality. But Christ's message differs in 
this conspicuous way from that of Socrates, 
or any and all of the ancient philosophers and 
teachers ; these classic thinkers spoke from 
the standpoint of mere deduction and conjec- 
ture, the Christ from the sure platform of 
absolute knowledge and authority. They 



JESUS CHRIST — ^THE TEACHER 41 

speculated and their speculation marks the 
highest reach of human imagination : He 
never even hints that the thing of which He 
speaks is other than that which comes from a 
positive knowledge. So great and marked is 
this difference, that a distinguished modern 
writer has made Christ's moral self-conscious- 
ness the basis of a remarkable apologetic. 
What awful authority we find in such pas- 
sages as these : " I am the way and the truth 
and the life." " I am the resurrection and the 
life." " I am the light of the world." Of 
this last statement a writer of signal ability 
has said, that the demonstration of this one 
single utterance through nineteen centuries of 
time, entitles Christ to the foremost place 
among the world's greatest teachers. Again, 
what an assumption of infinite authority do 
these final words of His convey : " All power 
is given unto Me in heaven and in earth." 
Every page of the Evangel is full of these ex- 
pressions that stagger us with the vastness 
and comprehensiveness of their claim. There 
may be many suggestive and striking paral- 
lels between His teaching and that of 
all the great religious philosophers, notably 



42 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

those of Confucius, Buddha and Zoroaster, but 
His is the only system that projects and con- 
templates the saving of the world universal. 
His conquest is designed to girdle the globe ; 
all other systems are esoteric and exclusive. 
Into the world's tongues and dialects these 
immortal teachings have been translated, and 
they fit with an exact nicety into the life and 
habits and practices of all peoples ; peasant 
and prince alike, glory in their priceless truths ; 
He furnishes a distinct and clearly defined 
philosophy for each individual life the world 
over. Those who differ from these utterances 
are compelled to recognize their superiority 
over those of any other writer or teacher. 
Says Ernest Kenan : " We must place Christ 
in the front rank of the great family of the 
true sons of God. God did not speak to Him 
as to one outside Himself, God was in Him, 
He drew from His own heart all He said of 
the Father." Spinoza calls Christ " the symbol 
of divine wisdom." 

" How petty," says Eousseau, " are all the 
books of the philosophers with all their pomp, 
compared with the Gospels ; can He whose life 
they tell be Himself no more than a mere man ? 



JESUS CHKIST — THE TEACHER 43 

What touching grace in His teaching, what 
loftiness in His maxims, what profound 
wisdom in His words." Napoleon described 
Him as being utterly beyond his comprehen- 
sion ; after a careful scrutiny of His life and 
words, this master of men declared " He is 
great with a greatness that crushes me." 
Thomas Carlj^le said concerning His teaching ; 
" Higher has the human thought not reached." 
From every land and out of every period do 
the world's great teachers and leaders come, to 
witness the consummation of all their hopes 
and aspirations in the simple person of the 
Nazarene. When we consider the utterly 
inadequate training of the early life of Christ, 
the barrenness and provincial simplicity of His 
environment, the evident poverty that debarred 
Him from the scholastic privileges of the 
academy, we are bound to admit that we are 
face to face with One, who cannot be measured 
by any ordinary human standards, and who 
cannot be understood on any lower plane than 
that of His divinity. That under the lowly 
roof at Nazareth He framed the highest philos- 
ophy of life that man has ever known, that 
He wrought out a scheme of salvation that 



44 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

embraces in its scope, life present, as well as 
life future, this is a fact that engages the in- 
terest and commands the reverence of all men, 
and furnishes a hint of the immeasurableness 
of His character and mind. Jesus Christ as 
the embodiment of all truth, its source as well 
as its interpreter, is the Master-teacher as 
well as the Master-man. Certain cardinal 
marks or characteristics we note in connection 
with His teachings ; we venture to say they are 
the distinguishing marks ; namely, their uni- 
versality, their authority and their tolerance. 
These are characteristics that peculiarly dif- 
ferentiate His teachings from those of other 
men. Some one calls language, " thought 
signals " ; a picturesque if not altogether ac- 
curate definition. But thought signals are 
largely designed for local interpretation, they 
have their largest usefulness within certain 
definite limitations. The average, or even the 
extraordinary thinker, expresses his thought 
and adapts his philosophy to conditions and 
environments with which he is familiar. This 
is a peculiar mark of those insular or esoteric 
religions that were born in the East. Even 
the statement of truth is governed with refer- 



JESUS CHRIST — THE TEACHER 45 

ence to its adaptability ; we note a very wide 
divergence between the teachings of men 
seeking to express the same fundamental 
thought, who are widely separated in time and 
place. Oriental philosophy and poetry and 
its general literature, have well defined quali- 
ties that widely differentiate them from the 
literatures and philosophies of the West. But 
while this is most evident in the teachings of 
men, we disclose in the teachings of the Christ, 
a quality and a power of transmitting thought, 
that render His teachings universally under- 
stood and universally adaptable. Spoken in 
the Orient, these words of His have to-day 
their finest exposition in the life of the Oc- 
cident. It is a singular fact that the East, 
with its tendencies to stimulate and exhilarate 
the imagination, has produced all the great re- 
ligious teachers, but in no single instance has 
it produced one whose teaching had the note 
of universality about it, saving in the case of 
Jesus Christ. The " thought signals " of the 
Master are not of local interpretation, they are 
not for the Jew or the man of some remote 
period or race, they are the easily understood 
admonitions and guides of all people the world 



46 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

over, and in no place and at no time have they 
had so wide and clear an application to life's 
action as at the present time under conditions 
widely divergent from those in which they 
were first uttered. Yes, the West has given 
the largest and finest interpretation to these 
words that came out of the East, and in the 
West do we find to-day the stirrings of that 
newer and later enterprise that shall one day 
bring to the darkest spots of the far East, the 
light of the Sun of righteousness. 

It is the element of familiarity, if we may so 
describe it, in the teachings of Christ, that 
brings Him within the ken of every man and 
makes His voice the best known among all 
classes and conditions of life. This quality in 
His utterances is one that we all too frequently 
overlook or fail to properly appreciate, and we 
venture to think that the deeper we ponder 
this singular characteristic of His teaching, the 
more profoundly will we be impressed with 
the Divinity of the One who can so completely 
speak a universal language. Human nature is 
the same the world over, j^es, but how few, 
if any, there have been, who could so com- 
pletely understand its every phase as to be 



JESUS CHRIST — THE TEACHER 47 

able to translate its deeper aspirations, and 
to furnish for those aspirations that which they 
supremely needed ? Equally distinguished 
with this quality of its universal adaptation 
and application is its strong note of a positive 
and majestic authority. The very tone of this 
teacher fascinates us; there is always some- 
thing peculiarly subtle and magnetic about the 
man whose utterance has about it the certainty 
of its warrant. If the great philosophers 
sprinkled the vault of night with the bright 
stars of hope and promise, then Jesus Christ 
lifted the curtain of gloom and mere specula- 
tion and ushered in the resplendent sun of the 
eternal morning. 

If He had spoken with any less certitude, if 
His teachings had about them anything of a 
negative character, they could not be the guid- 
ing and inspiring influences of our life. When 
it comes to those things that relate to the 
deepest facts concerning life, we must have no 
word that is tinctured with doubt. From His 
first utterance in the temple at twelve years 
of age, down to His final word on the cross, 
there is a certainty and an authority about all 
that He says. His is a teaching that seeks for 



48 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

no precedents ; there is nothing in the whole 
realm of philosophy that has anything to add 
to its incomparable beauty. Not from the 
great prophecies does He borrow light, but to 
them He lends the illuminating torch that re- 
veals their peculiar power ; read in the light 
of His sacred utterances, the Old Testament 
takes on a new meaning. He plucked the 
fairest flowers of the world's most splendid 
philosophies and noblest religious systems 
and wove them into a chaplet of divinest 
beauty and placed it upon the brow of hu- 
manity. Here is a catholicity of inclusiveness 
that may well excite the emulation of the 
modern disciple to-day. Whatever is true 
issues from Him, and rising no higher than its 
source, finds its way by devious courses back 
to the fountain from whence it came. But 
whenever Christ blends with His teachings 
the conclusions of other men. He always lends 
to them the positive note of an unchanging 
conviction. He saw truth in everything, but 
an unregistered kind of truth; truth that 
lacked the final imprimatur of authority, and 
this He gave to it. Witness this in His teach- 
ing concerning the immortality of the soul: 



JESUS CHRIST — THE TEACHER 49 

the mere statement of the fact, or perhaps 
better said, the mere statement of the con- 
jecture of the immortality of life, was no new 
teaching; it finds its repeated utterance in 
almost every great teacher and philosopher; 
but the thing that it lacked was authority. 
The beauty of the teaching of Socrates on this 
great and all-consuming riddle of the ages, is 
transcendently noble and fine, and his whole 
life takes on the splendor of his philosophy, 
but it is nothing more than the reasoning of a 
mind that is restricted by the same narrow 
limitations that hedge in other men ; he can 
only speculate. Jesus Christ came to bring 
life and immortality to light ; to give the posi- 
tive word where there had been nothing but 
speculation, to dissipate the clouds of doubt 
and bring in the full-orbed day of certitude. 
He speaks here with an affirmation born of 
absolute knowledge and authority. Or again, 
when He declares the eternal will of the 
Father what a sense of security characterizes 
His utterance ; He does not speak as a messen- 
ger, nor yet as an ambassador bearing some 
royal mandate; it is the utterance of the 
Father's own voice. Here in a very remarkable 



50 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

way does He emphasize His oneness with the 
Father. No other teacher that has ever com- 
manded the attention of men has this quality 
in his teaching ; each philosophy witnesses to 
some law or system of logic in the outworking 
of its theory or the propounding of its dictum ; 
it is never so with the statement or teaching 
of the Master. There is no human law by 
which we may disclose the processes of His 
thought; He does not undertake to lift the 
veil of His secret life ; there are no marks by 
which we may follow the channel of His 
mental action ; when He speaks, it is the word 
unchallenged and unchallengeable; a finality 
of conclusion is the distinguishing quality in 
His every utterance. In the most conclusive 
way He gives to the world, not to some iso- 
lated part of it, but to the world at large, the 
philosophy that in its minuteness and com- 
pleteness touches its every experience and 
phase, and here as in everything else that He 
said, there is no other court of appeal. It was 
no wonder that His apostle, overwhelmed by 
the majesty of the Master's teaching and with 
the impotency of his own life, cried out, 
" Lord, to whom shall we go, Thou hast the 



JESUS CHRIST — THE TEACHER 51 

words of eternal life." Here is an authority 
that is as positive as the inviolable laws that 
rule supreme in the great solar system; so 
binding and arbitrary is it, that its slightest 
infringement produces a discord in the sym- 
phony of human life. Its very positiveness 
gives to our faith in Him a sense of security 
that nothing may dislodge. To Him as its 
great and final witness all the best thought of 
the world leads, and from Him as its supreme 
interpreter all the world's finest action pro- 
ceeds. The need of the revival of this positive 
and dogmatic note in the teaching of the mes- 
sage of the Christ, is an imperative demand 
of the present day. It was the lack of the 
positive in the teaching of one great church, 
that compelled a distinguished priest to seek 
for it in another religious body. 

What we find of the authoritative in the 
teaching of Christ, we also find of the spirit of 
tolerance. Great as He is as a dogmatist, in- 
sistent as are His demands, there is in His 
every word and action the large tender spirit 
of tolerance. Not the tolerance that tempor- 
izes with sin ; not the tolerance that is politic 
in its action, but the tolerance that wins by the 



52 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

largeness of its aflfection and the breadth of its 
comprehensiveness. Faber caught this spirit 
and expressed it in his lines : 

*' There's a wideness in God's mercy, 

Like the wideness of the sea ; 
There's a kindness in His justice 

Which is more than liberty. 
For the love of God is broader 

Than the measure of man's mind, 
And the heart of the Eternal 

Is most wonderfully kind." 

Jesus Christ wooed men and women, not by- 
some arbitrary and severe law, but by a 
sympathy and love that broke down all barriers 
and dispelled all doubt. Springing from a race 
distinguished for its exclusiveness, reared in a 
home wherein the narrowness and bigotry of 
His people were emphasized, Jesus in every 
teaching and in every action, betrays a breadth 
of sympathy and a spirit of fellowship coter- 
minous with every near and remote phase of 
life. Whether it is at the board of the rich 
and despised Publican or with the woman of 
Samaria, or with that other, taken in her 
shame and guilt, He is ever and always the 
tender, forgiving, tolerant Master. Not alone 
in some individual and isolated case does He 



JESUS CHRIST — THE TEACHEB 53 

display this large and generous quality, but in 
the whole scope of His teaching is it evidenced. 
The reach of this tolerance finds its expression 
with the fickle and erring disciples, and again 
with the dying thief on the cross. Every- 
where and in everything. His love transcends 
the cupidity and apostasy of those whose lives 
He touched. As He commissioned His dis- 
ciples, it was not the spirit of a narrow and 
limited apostleship that He taught, but as a 
band of men who knew no lines of distinction 
and who sought for no marks of preferment, 
He sent them forth to disciple the nations. 
All of the parables wherein He seeks to set 
forth the scope of His kingdom, are charged 
with this comprehensiveness and extent of 
view. He would not ^^ break the bruised reed 
or quench the smoking flax " ; He would not 
even inhibit one who followed not with His 
disciples, because, all true and noble effort was 
kindred with His and theirs. In the grasp of 
His system He embraces all systems and all 
teachers ; He came not to destroy, but to ful- 
fil. Tolerance is at the very root of His whole 
method, and although it struggled long for 
supremacy in the teachings of His apostles, it 



54 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

at last triumphed and lent its peculiar glory to 
their splendid conquests. 

It was the spirit of tolerance that resisted 
not the buffetings and scourgings, it was toler- 
ance that withheld the one word that might 
have brought the ministering legions of angels, 
it was tolerance that by a single look of re- 
buke mingled with deepest love recalled an 
apostate disciple on the night of His trial; 
yes, it was tolerance, that over a multitude 
that clamored for His crucifixion and a world 
that denied His impassioned appeal could cry, 
even in the hour of His agony, " Father for- 
give them, they know not what they do." It 
is this large and comprehensive tolerance, that 
for nineteen centuries of time and in every 
land has been drawing the world unto Him, 
and it is this that to-day is the distinguishing 
note of His truest and noblest teachers, who 
throughout the earth are discipling the nations 
and adding jewels to His diadem. 



JESUS CHKIST— THE REFORMER 



**The disciple of Jesus Christ has become the conqueror of 
the world, — not from the standpoint of materialism and 
brutality, for violence is not in the spirit of the crucified 
Master, but in the sense of goodness, of abnegation, of 
sacrifice and of moral dignity. In sowing these virtues as 
seeds of life. He prepares and enriches the human soil until 
it is oapable of all culture and of all harvests/' 

— Fere Didon. 

^^The social art of living is learned, not in the school of 
polemic, but in that of the crucified." — Brierly. 

** Who but will acknowledge that Christianity has become 
one of the greatest promoters of civilization ? And where- 
fore ? Because it has changed the interior man, his opinions 
and sentiments ; because it has regenerated his moral, his in- 
tellectual character. ' ' —Guizot 



JESUS CHEIST— THE REFOEMEB 

** It hath been said by them of old time ; — but I say nnto 
yon. ''—St. Matthew 5 : 33, 34. 

AEEFOKMER might be described as 
one who breaks with tradition and cus- 
toms ; a renovator of human life ; in an 
extreme definition, he might be described as a 
revolutionist. Among no class or race of people 
has tradition or custom found a larger follow- 
ing than among the Jews. The literalist and 
the traditionalist have their finest exemplars 
within the confines of Palestine. Jesus Christ 
by no means despised the honored customs of 
His people, He observed punctiliously their 
prevailing practices, but from the day that He 
made His appearance in the temple courts at 
thirty years of age down to the hour of His 
crucifixion, He was a reformer and re-caster of 
thought, and habits of action. 

Christ is so generally represented as the 
gentlest and tenderest of men, that we lose 
much of the marvelous and splendid heroism 

57 



58 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

that characterized His life. From the first, 
He was "a man of sorrows and acquainted 
with grief"; the latter is a fair definition 
of the life story of every great reformer and 
leader. Emerson submits as his definition of 
the hero, a man who, " taking both reputation 
and life in his hand, will with perfect urbanity 
dare the gibbet and the mob, by the absolute 
truth of his speech and the rectitude of his be- 
havior." 

Measured by this standard, the Master is 
colossal in His heroism. 

In his little book on the "Manliness of 
Christ," Thomas Hughes, the famous master 
of Kugby, describes the difference that exists 
between mere physical heroism and mental 
and moral heroism; and after submitting a 
number of extraordinary and marvelous deeds 
of daring and courage, he concludes that the 
last proof and test of courage and manliness 
is loyalty to truth, — " the most rare and diffi- 
cult of all human qualities." So heroic is 
Christ, in Lord Tennyson's estimate of Him, 
that he begins his great poem, " In Memoriam," 
with the line : 

** Strong Son of God, immortal love." 



JESUS CHRIST — THE REFORMER 59 

Any conception of Christ as a teacher, that 
portrays Him as one whose humility and meek- 
ness obscured the strong, masculine and fear- 
less elements of His nature, is untrue to His 
real life. The flash of deep and awful indigna- 
tion, the word of stern and fearless rebuke, 
the action, full of the force and power of His 
sense of right and justice, these were as evi- 
dent in His dealing with those things that 
were false and superficial and vicious, as were 
His notable acts of gentleness and considera- 
tion for the weaknesses and failures of those 
who were dominated by sinful propensities. 
We know of nothing finer or more heroic, than 
His oft repeated attacks upon the hoUowness 
of a system, that sought to cover with plati- 
tudes and elaborate ceremonial, the hypocrisy 
and shallowness of its votaries. In the instance 
of our text, Christ is declaring His great plat- 
form of action ; it is the sermon on the mount. 
Loftier maxims of living than He here states, 
the world does not contain. He is indicating 
in the immediate case, the difference between 
a mere moral law that operates from without, 
and a dominant and controlling religious im- 
pulse that operates from within. He demands, 



60 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

not alone the compliance with a law that is 
designed for the general good, but the opera- 
tion of an infinitely finer system that affects 
and controls the thought. The Jew was a 
ritualist and an externalist. The law he ob- 
served was autocratic and arbitrary: it was 
largely observed because it was autocratic and 
compulsory ; hence he was religious because a 
civil and ecclesiastical code made a certain 
kind of ceremonial indispensable. For centu- 
ries the Jews had been rigorists in the minutest 
observance of their law. It was against such 
a religion, the religion of mere conformity, 
that Christ the Reformer leveled His first 
blow. There is a spirit here of sublime au- 
thority in His utterance ; " I say unto you " ; 
it is full of audacious boldness. Says a modern 
writer : " No reformer succeeds by asking 
little of men ; the more autocratic is his de- 
mand the more likely is it to meet with obedi- 
ence." 

The Jews were first astonished, then angered 
by His teaching and self-assertiveness. They 
were all amazed, saying, " What new doctrine 
is this?" 

It was a new kind of utterance and one 



JESUS CHRIST — THE REFORMER 61 

unfamiliar to the human ear ; but beyond the 
utterance, was the might of His person, as He 
came into collision with the customs and 
practices that had nothing beyond tradition to 
sustain them. To submit is always easier than 
to combat ; no harder or severer task may one 
set himself to accomplish, than to correct or re- 
adjust long existing conditions. Luther, follow- 
ing his humble habit as a simple priest at Wit- 
tenberg, might have lived a life of greater com- 
fort and ease, had he not become the bold and 
aggressive enemy of the Vatican and Papal in- 
dulgences. Savonarola as the prior of St. 
Mark's, might have impressed his influence 
upon Florence as a consecrated leader and 
preacher, but the profligacy and viciousness of 
a Medicean court so aroused his righteous in- 
dignation and inflamed his passion for truth, 
that he fearlessly inveighed against the cor- 
ruptions of his age and people, and paid the 
penalty of martyrdom for his boldness. To 
break with tradition and custom, with the 
consciousness that to do so means to incur the 
bitterness and wrath of one's own people, is an 
awful tax upon the spirit of self -ease and in- 
dulgence. That Jesus Christ experienced the 



62 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

pangs of a bitter and harsh judgment and that 
He suffered from the reproach of His own 
kinsmen, is evident upon every line of the 
Gospel narrative. 

As a reformer, He was not tyrannical or un- 
generous ; He did not seek to make life hard 
and ascetic, His was not the rule of one who 
is out of sympathy and touch with the largest 
and best that is in human life. He was only 
too cognizant of the limitations and environing 
influences that hedged men in, and that largely 
controlled their mental as well as their physical 
action. He knew what was in man ; the good 
as well as the bad, the virtue as well as the 
vice, the aspiration after holiness as well as the 
lower animal propensities. Never has human 
nature had so kind and generous a judge, 
never one who so completely sympathized 
with its weaknesses or who sought with such 
persistency to give it the hope of better things. 
His judgments are always fair and His ap- 
peals based upon the enrichment, not the im- 
poverishment of man's best and truest interests. 

A champion of all that was true and pure, 
the espouser of any cause where weakness was 
made the sport of physical prowess; an un- 



JESUS CHRIST — THE REFORMER 63 

flinching advocate of the downtrodden and 
helpless. He was at all times and under all 
conditions, the Standard Bearer of the world's 
divinest truth, and its unexampled Leader in 
all that makes for human betterment. Often- 
times the religious reformer is one whose 
humanness is not in consonance with that of 
his fellows ; a lack of real sympathy and a too 
remote contact with the issues of life, render 
many an otherwise strong leader, ineffective 
in his efforts after the world's correction. It 
was not so with the Master ; He never em- 
ploys means that betray a lack of fellow- 
feeling or sympathetic knowledge of the con- 
ditions that obtain among all classes and 
conditions of men. A world's-man in the larg- 
est sense, intensely human and yet perfectly 
divine. He met the problems of life as one who 
was in all points tempted, even as we are, yet 
without sin. No conception of the scope of 
His work of reform could be reasonable or fair, 
that did not take cognizance of this fact. 
He was a reformer whose work was coexten- 
sive with all that relates to life's every interest, 
and it is only by and through the realization 
cf this, that we can rise to a proper conscious- 



64 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

ness of His place among the leaders of thought 
and action. If He came to bring to men a 
truer system of religious devotion, if His 
teaching and His practice gave to the world 
its finest type of the life-expectant, then it is 
equally true that He deals with those things 
that have to do with time and conditions that 
affect the life-existent. All too often in our 
effort to reveal what He has done for the 
soul in giving to it the power of an endless life, 
we treat with scant indifference the work He 
did for the bodies of men in giving them their 
largest development and service. 

There is nothing of the doctrinaire or vi- 
sionaire about this Man of Nazareth ; He does 
not deal with problems that, because they are 
remote, are of indifferent interest to men 
struggling with the all-consuming occupations 
and cares of life : Jesus is the reformer in the 
market place and at the centres of human life ; 
nothing is too common for His hand to touch, 
nothing too unclean for the exercise of His 
purifying power. A future City whose 
citizens know no touch of contamination, is to 
be wrought out of a present environment 
where virtue and honor and true righteous- 



JESUS CHRIST — THE REFORMER 65 

ness are its indispensable requirements. There 
were two distinct courses that He pursued in 
the uplifting and renovating of life : the first 
had to do with the correction and readjustment 
of its religious practice and habit, the second 
had to do with its large relation and responsi- 
bility to the body social. The religious and 
the social were the two points of attack. In 
coming to a people distinguished for their re- 
ligious habit. He sought to disclose the great 
difference that exists between mere ceremonial 
or external religion, and a deep personal con- 
sciousness of one's relation to God. The first 
is largely concerned with aesthetics and all 
that relates to the artistic in worship, the 
second is concerned with a deep sense of obli- 
gation that renders all life, in its every oc- 
cupation and service, amenable to the will of 
God. Christ demanded internal piety and 
holiness instead of external service and cere- 
monial. Dawson in his fine analysis of the 
life of Christ, says, " He perceives that one of 
the most deadly effects of ritualism is to put 
external rectitude in the place of internal 
piety and virtue." The cleansing of the temple 
and His characterization of the religious char- 



66 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

latans of His day as " whited sepulchres," was 
the unfailing attitude of His life towards all 
that was superficial and unreal. The clean 
hands and pure hearts, were of more worth in 
the sight of God, than nice discriminations in 
matters of ceremonial. To make clean the 
outside, was not sufficient ; that served for the 
morality of expediency ; the weightier matters 
of the law, judgment, mercy and truth, these 
were the bulwarks of true and abiding char- 
acter. His blows fell heavy and hard upon 
the religious practices of His day, and it was 
this persistent opposition that led Him even- 
tually to the Gethsemane of desertion and to 
the Calvary of crucifixion. There is no 
picture more inspiring or thrilling than His 
descent with knotted whip-cords, upon the 
trafficker in the temple precincts. No more 
daring or heroic service is recorded upon the 
page of history. The Son of God, single- 
handed, with naught but the awfulness of His 
authority declaring the immunity of His 
Father's house from the nefarious practices of 
the tradesman, here is a picture majestic and 
sublime. Here is the true reformer plucking 
worship from the shamelessness of a corruption 



JESUS CHRIST — THE REFORMER 67 

that made rich the custodians of the sacred 
oracles. What a Master of situations is this 
One, nay, what a Creator of true and faultless 
devotion is this new prophet from Nazareth. 
To release religion from the thralls of sacer- 
dotalism, ecclesiasticism and traditionalism, 
this was the reforming work of the Christ. 

Again, what a striking illustration of the 
newer and truer worship is that which He sets 
forth as He sits by Jacob's well, tired with the 
day's long pilgrimage. No temple walls can 
mark off the boundaries or determine the 
limitations of true worship. Even the He- 
rodian temple, rich as it is with an unbroken 
history of centuries, and that other house of 
worship that stood upon the hill of Gerezim, 
cannot fix the seat of the Father's throne. 
No localized centre of devotion may become 
the Mecca of those, who throughout the world, 
have equal access to the Mercy Seat. 

What a striking and awful contrast there is 
between the dictum of a church that set as 
its standard, " Extra ecclesia nulla salus," and 
the broad, comprehensive, catholic inclusive- 
ness of the Master's teaching. What mighty 
and far-reaching lessons has Christendom yet 



68 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

to learn from this Divine lover of the human 
soul. In His presence "our little systems 
have their day, they have their day and cease 
to be." 

Before His judgment throne all the petti- 
nesses and strifes of party discord are awed 
into silence. 

What Jesus the Kef ormer did for true and 
unrestrained worship, may never be undone, 
except to the hurt of His church. He length- 
ened its cords and strengthened its stakes, 
He widened the boundaries of its habitation 
and stretched abroad its curtains over every 
spot where men kneel to worship the Father 
"in spirit and in truth." For an exclusive 
and insular religion, He instituted one that 
reaches to earth's remotest bounds : for a party 
Shibboleth, He gave a password that opens 
the way up to the heights of mercy and for- 
giveness and unbars the massy gates of Para- 
dise. Yes, Jesus the reformer of a world's 
religious habit, gives it bread for stones and 
for the empty form substitutes the true manna. 
He strikes at the very root of a charity that 
gives its alms " to be seen of men," and upon 
the widow with her two consecrated mites He 



JESUS CHRIST — THE REFORMER 69 

places the laurel of unfading splendor. Every- 
thing that relates to man's approach to the 
Father, He studiously observes and fearlessly 
corrects. What wholesomeness do we find in 
all these teachings of His, that emphasize the 
difference between true worship and false. 
What a reach from the Mosaic law of exclu- 
siveness, to the Christ law of free and open 
accessibility to the great throne of grace. 

The second conspicuous and signal reform 
that He prosecuted, was in the direction of a 
better civic and social condition. Jesus Christ 
is incomparably the world's greatest Social 
Economist. His definition of the two obliga- 
tions of life as we find it in the summary of 
the law, expresses precisely the line of His 
policy. First, the right relation between man 
and his God, to love Him with all the heart, 
soul and mind ; and second, the right relation 
between man and his fellows, to love his 
neighbor as himself. In all that He did along 
the line of social reform, we find Him quite as 
revolutionary as in His effort after a true 
worship. 

The Orient is thoroughly infected, and has 
always been, with the spirit of caste and social 



70 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

exclusiveness. The Jew stood with great per- 
sistency for classification and division ; the 
contempt in which Nazareth was held illus- 
trates this; there was even a tribal exclu- 
siveness. Samaria was an outcast, unrecog- 
nized and unhonored. Against all this the 
Master inveighed. His parables of the good 
Samaritan and of the pharisee and publican 
in public worship, denounce any method of 
discrimination that seeks to put social prestige 
in the place of true moral worth. 

It is the Master's great teaching con- 
cerning the commonness of all life ; His in- 
sistence upon the interrelations and interde- 
pendencies of all life, and its enf oldment in the 
eternal Fatherhood of God, that give Him 
peculiar distinction among all the Oriental 
religionists. To an autocratic aristocracy He 
brought the comprehensive teaching of the 
brotherhood of man. What He taught He 
practiced ; He moved with men who had lost 
caste and reputation among their fellows. He 
was contemptuously declared to be the " friend 
of publicans and sinners." He insisted that, 
occupation or place in human society, did not 
determine a man's fitness or unfitness to be 



JESUS CHRIST — THE REFORMER 71 

recognized as worthy of his fellow's confidence 
and esteem. The fact that one might boast of 
Abraham as his father, constituted nothing, 
unless his life witnessed to the qualities of the 
great patriarch. A man was not the creature 
of mere environment; antecedent conditions 
could not determine the whole trend of his 
future career. In enunciating such strange 
and heretical doctrines as these, Christ brought 
down upon Himself the bitter antipathy of 
His contemporaries. At times even the dis- 
ciples could hardly sustain His declarations. 
What this bold reformer sought, was a larger 
and more comprehensive human society; He 
insisted upon a new basis of judgment : He 
aimed to develop a commonwealth here that 
would in some small way approximate that of 
the great metropolis of heaven. Christ is 
eminently the world's chief civilizing force, 
and His proposals for its betterment, though 
so ideal, were so capable of realization that, 
for nineteen centuries it has been moving for- 
ward under His divine leading. 

That it shall one day move up to the perfect 
fulfilment of His large ideals, we surely be 
lieve, but it will come to its earlier recognition 



72 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

of His philosophy when it has come to under- 
stand the intimacy of His relation to things 
human. Jesus Christ is not the creator of a 
sect or of a class whose chief occupation is with 
some " far-oflf, divine event towards which the 
whole creation moves." It will move with 
greater haste towards this final consummation, 
when it has learned that future bliss is built 
upon the sure foundations of present happiness; 
it will come to its higher attainment when it 
has accomplished here a society whose control- 
ling maxim is expressed in the law of human 
brotherhood. That Christ dealt with the large 
policies of life, that He is intimately related to 
everything that means for its finer fulfilment 
here, is evident in His every word and action. 
To coordinate all its interests, to bring into 
helpful sympathy and cooperation all its 
factors, to create and develop a state whose 
society is built upon the sure and permanent 
foundations of Christian socialism, these called 
forth His deep concern and unfailing endeavor. 
When we give Christ His rightful and proper 
place as the world's greatest reformer we will 
bring Him within the range of all that con- 
cerns human affairs, and hasten that day when 



JESUS CHRIST — THE REFORMER 73 

the kingdoms of this world shall become the 
kingdoms of our Lord and His Christ. The 
pierced hand of this divine Keformer must be 
felt, touching the world's every interest, and 
the divine conception of a real universal 
brotherhood must, with its revivifying power, 
cover the earth even as the waters cover the 
sea. 



JESUS CHRIST— THE FRIEND 



*^ What was His mode of sympathy with men ? He did 
not sit down to philosophize about the progress of the 
species, or dream about a millennium. He gathered about 
Him twelve men. He formed one friendship, special, con- 
centrated, deep. He did not give Himself out as the leader 
of fehe publican's cause or the champion of the rights of the 
dangerous classes. He associated with Himself Matthew, a 
publican called from the detested seat of custom : He went 
into the house of Zaccheus, and treated him like a fellow 
creature, a brother and a son of Abraham. His catholicity, 
or philanthropy, was not an abstraction, but an aggregate of 
personal attachments.^* — Frederick W, Eoiertson, 

** O heart I made, a heart beats here ! 
Face my hands fashioned, see it in myself I 
Thou hast no power nor may'st conceive of mine. 
But love I gave thee, with myself to love, 
And thou must love Me who have died for thee.*' 

— Browning, 



JESUS CHRIST— THE FRIEND 

** Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay 
down his life for his friends."-— St. John 15 : 13. 

THE story of the world's great friend- 
ships would be the story of its great 
inspirations. It is the touch of a 
kindly hand, the encouragement of a sympa- 
thetic voice, the unfailing tenderness of a loving 
eye, that give to our best endeavors and finest 
aspirations their most splendid enrichment. 

Jesus Christ was not unlike other men 
in His search for the love and sympathy 
of friendship. That He had His intimates 
in the town of Nazareth, that He inter- 
changed confidences with those with whom 
He consorted, we may venture to believe. He 
was in no sense ascetic in His tendencies ; the 
wilderness with its lonely vigils, did not fas- 
cinate Him as it did His forerunner, John the 
Baptist. Beginning His ministry, He called to 
His side certain men to be His immediate 
friends and confidants. With these simple 

77 



78 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

men He spent the days of that wondrous three 
years' ministry, making ready for the inaugura- 
tion of His great kingdom on earth. To these 
men He committed the vast work of its or- 
ganization, and to them He gave those words 
that constitute the basis of His whole philoso- 
phy. Into those more secret experiences of 
His life, where He went to the Mount of 
Transfiguration, or again when He came to the 
silence and loneliness of Gethsemane, He took 
with Him those of His disciples who had been 
nearest to Him, Peter and James and John. 
Few words that He ever uttered are sadder 
than those, when at the great crisis of His life 
He appeals to His friends who had so long been 
with Him, saying : " Will ye also go away ? " 
We would venture to say, that the friendship 
and companionship of men, as it found expres- 
sion in the selection and fellowship of these 
peasant disciples, constitutes one of the most 
touching and inspiring incidents in the Master's 
life. It furnishes another one of those touches 
that serve to emphasize in His life its deep 
human quality. Indeed, it was upon the basis 
of a strong, unchanging friendship, that He 
laid the foundations of His system. Binding 



JESUS CHKIST — THE FRIEND 79 

these men to Himself and to each other, He 
created a band of devoted and attached fol- 
lowers such as the world does not contain. 
That His disciples were men of diverse tem- 
peraments and tendencies, that they found 
points of disagreement, is evident in the short 
but suggestive story that records their early 
achievements ; nevertheless, so intimately had 
He bound them to Himself that nothing that 
came afterwards ever disturbed their perfect 
confidence in their Master. It was this un- 
broken unity of loyal and complete devotion 
that made possible the remarkable career of 
this band of peasant disciples. 

The story of the four Gospels is not alone 
the story of a life isolated and remote, too 
awful in its majesty to be comprehended, it is 
as well the inspiring story of Christ's intimacy 
with men. His friendship for them, and His 
eternal sacrifice for their salvation. If the 
love of David and Jonathan is likened to the 
love of women, then by what figure shall we 
compare the love of Jesus Christ ? It is too 
deep for the plummet of human imagination to 
fathom. In the making of His intimacies, it 
is interesting to note the method by which 



80 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

Christ approached men. It had a singular di- 
rectness about it and an element that drew 
men to Him and made His influence irresistible. 

So persuasive was He with Andrew, that the 
pervading influence of the new found friend- 
ship immediately spread to his brother, Peter, 
and " he brought him to Jesus." Again, when 
He called the two brothers, James and John 
from their fishing nets. His appeal as well as 
His person were so magnetic, that they left 
their occupation and followed Him without 
delay. Meeting Matthew at the receipt of 
customs, active and intense with his arduous 
service. He speaks with so much authority the 
word, " follow Me," that he abandoned his oc- 
cupation and took up his new found calling. 

With Nathaniel, it was the strange and inex- 
plicable character of one who could read his 
inmost thought, that arrested and held his 
attention. In each instance as He gathers 
about Him His singular associates, there is a 
power of attraction in His person and message 
that masters all with whom He comes in con- 
tact, and silences all question as to His au- 
thority. 

Never does He give promise to these first 



JESUS CHRIST — THE FRIEND 81 

disciples of aught that suggests preferment in 
the coming kingdom ; never does He present 
to them anything that speaks of other than a 
life of stern and persistent exaction. 

It was a friendship that carried with it want 
and suffering, but whose reward was its own, 
and through whose ministry it was to become 
indissoluble. In all this ingathering of His 
chosen intimates, Christ wins them by the 
beauty of His person and the charm of His 
teaching. Never was there one who had less 
to offer of worldly preferment and more to 
give of worldly persecution. In the bestowing 
of their confidence and love upon the Nazarene, 
these humble men had nothing to expect in 
return, saving that which a really great friend- 
ship affords. That they had, in this early 
stage of their intimacy, any smallest concep- 
tion of the majesty of His person or the vast- 
ness of His enterprise, is not even hinted at ; 
it was the loftiness of His maxims, the regal- 
ness of His bearing, the tenderness of His 
love that wooed and won them. There is 
something suggestively strange in all this 
formative period of their friendship for Him : 
the touch of anything that hints at success or 



82 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

coming power, must have been remote from 
their vision. Here was a fellowship that ren- 
ders all comparison impossible : here was a 
subtle attractiveness in the person of the one 
who drew them, that fills us with wonderment. 
Jesus Christ going up and down the ways of 
common life, drawing to His unrecognized 
standard and apparently revolutionary teach- 
ing, a body of stalwart, active, business men, 
is one of the most suggestive incidents on the 
sacred page. How can it be accounted for by 
any other method of reasoning, than that He 
was the world's supreme Magnet; it is the 
foreshadowing of the fulfilment of His later 
prophecy, that He would draw all men unto 
Him. Because of these very intimacies with 
men of humble life and habit they called Him 
in derision, " the friend of publicans and sin- 
ners." Glorious title for the world's Master- 
Friend. What could these unlettered peasants 
add to the lustre of His person or the might 
of His teaching ? Surely they had nothing to 
bring. It was evidently not for their learning 
or position that He called them within the cir- 
cle of intimacy ; it was that, out of a real, true, 
human friendship He might build up that larger 



JESUS CHRIST — THE FRIEND 83 

circle of fraternal interests which was destined 
to girdle the globe. This was the primary- 
purpose of it all, but beyond this there was 
the satisfaction of that which even the Son of 
Man craved, namely, the confidence and love 
of His fellows. That He desired this, is evi- 
dent from that touching appeal which He 
made to the disciples, when a dispute arose as 
to His identity ; after asking them what the 
world at large thought of Him, He turned 
with passionate yearning to their own indi- 
vidual view, saying, " but whom say ye that I 
am ? " It was upon the statement of one of 
these very friends that He declared the whole 
future of His kingdom was to rest. The 
Petros of the church is the confession of 
Simon's faith. Yes, Jesus Christ did not se- 
lect men that He might draw from them the 
plan of His system, He did not select them 
that He might enrich His own philosophy; 
that. He wrought out in the loneliness of His 
own great life (and in this He is not unlike 
other great and masterful leaders) : but He se- 
lected and chose them to their high ofiice, 
that He might satisfy the cravings of a heart 
that had human instincts and longings. 



84 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

In this aspect of His friendship for men I 
think there is something that is irresistible. 
Christ loved them because they were of Him- 
self. 

It was the same passion that controls every 
other human heart that found its expression 
in the Christ; He loved men because they 
were His, and because they bore the seal of 
divine sonship. Another aspect of His friend- 
ship, is its recognition of the worth in the man 
rather than in his environing conditions. He 
chose men, not for what they Jiad^ but for 
what they were. It was not the robe of a 
splendid outward appearance, nor the bor- 
rowed habit of a time-worn and faded ances- 
try, nor yet the acquisition of a rich compe- 
tency, it was the man^ the man in the naked- 
ness of his real worth. 

That He did not seek for His consorts in 
the centres of learning, that He did not draw 
His disciples from the courts of power, is not 
strange. 

He was emphasizing the eternal fact, that 
worth is not constituted by anything that is 
extraneous to the man himself. The finest 
inspirations of all true friendship are drawn 



JESUS CHRIST — THE FRIEND 85 

from those who bring nothing but the rugged, 
native worth of a true manhood or woman- 
hood. We can add nothing to those qualities 
of mind and heart with which God endues a 
man, that will make them more resplendent. 
The royalty of a splendid personality receives 
nothing from the robe it wears. Peter and 
John, the JBshermen, are the incomparable 
disciples of the Christ. But Christ's intimacies 
were not confined to those who were His im- 
mediate disciples, He found men and women 
everywhere to whom He was peculiarly drawn. 
The home of Mary and Martha at Bethany 
was the centre of many of His choicest ex- 
periences and furnished the platform from 
which He gave some of the most wonderful 
utterances of His lips. Indeed the very at- 
mosphere of the home life with its closely 
knit friendships seemed to furnish an inspira- 
tion for His message. Again, witness His 
evident longing for companionship and fellow- 
ship in His repeated conversations with those 
whose lives He touched on His pilgrimages. 
Wherever He was, sitting by a well, or on the 
dusty highway, or in the crowded streets of 
some city, He was ever seeking for the touch 



86 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

of some other life : many of His noblest words 
were spoken in these apparently chance con- 
tacts. The evening when He dined with 
Zaccheus, at his board, must have furnished 
Him with peculiar satisfaction. Everywhere 
and with every one, Jesus reached out for the 
human touch; He was concerned, not about 
things, but about men. The very extent and 
variety of His contacts and the comprehensive- 
ness of His love find expression in the ever 
widening circle of those with whom He found 
something in common. In all these instances, 
and we have cited but a few, we remark the 
enriching power of His touch upon life. Life 
that was ordinary and commonplace seemed 
to take on a new interest, the prosaic and 
mediocre felt the thrill of a force that was 
hitherto unknown ; the very touch of the 
outer hem of His robe had virtue in it. The 
growth of the disciples under this benign influ- 
ence, has been the wonder of the ages. 

He made them so mighty that even the 
court of the Caesars felt that something new 
had entered into human life; yes, He so in- 
spired the genius of His followers, that the 
philosophers of Greece recognized in them the 



JESUS OHEIST — THE FRIEND 87 

forerunners of a mightier teaching than their 
own. 

Here in this Master we find, even in His 
search for companions, that which compels our 
love and draws forth our deepest devotion. 
The many hours He spent in quiet, intimate 
conversation with these men ; the interchange 
of views concerning the burning social and 
political questions of the day : the confusion 
and bewilderment on their part when He 
touched upon the secret springs of His own life 
work, all these were a part of the intimacy 
that made His person sacred and His mission 
divine. 

We can almost follow the gradual develop- 
ment of the disciples' growing conception con- 
cerning Him, as at length it dawned upon 
them, that He with whom they talked was 
other than human. How in that more chosen 
band, comprising Peter and James and John, 
there must have been again and again deep 
musings over the singular qualities that His 
strange nature disclosed. 

Doubtless one and all of this chosen few, 
would in some walk and talk alone with Him, 
seek for a new revelation of that power whose 



88 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

very demonstrations they were the daily wit- 
nesses of, and whose singular operation they 
could not fathom. With perfect reasonable- 
ness we can conceive of Christ as betraying to 
the tender nature of John, the deeper passions 
of His soul, or revealing to the stalwart Peter 
the strong, heroic longings of His heart. To 
think thus of Christ is not to make Him less 
divine but more human, and then through His 
humanness to come within the range of His 
divinity. 

It is no irreverence to say that Christ de- 
pended in a way, upon the love and loyalty of 
His friends; witness this on that last night 
when He gently rebuked their apparent indif- 
ference in the garden : " Could ye not watch 
with Me one hour ? " Not that He needed 
other than the communion of His Father, but 
there was the satisfaction of the human na- 
ture to be met. He wanted that which we all 
so sorely need repeatedly through life, the 
touch of a kindred hand and the word of a 
loving lip. If we can only enter sympathetic- 
ally into this Master life, we shall come to 
know more and more, how truly it partakes 
of our nature. Another splendid quality in 



JESUS CHRIST — THE FRIEND 89 

this friendship, that characterizes its every 
phase, is its unchangeableness. " And having 
loved His own He loved them unto the end." 

Christ's life was as full of viscissitudes ; as 
invested with all that the caprice and fickle- 
ness of man can lend to it, as any we know : 
He lived a life full of manifold and swift 
changes. He rose step by step to the great 
accomplishment to which He was committed ; 
yet through it all, there is the same devotion 
and affection for those who were with Him 
from the beginning. He was as gentle and 
careful of these men as if they were children ; 
He fed and nurtured and cared for them as a 
mother for her infant. 

At the very last, when the growing agony 
of the cross is upon Him, He recognizes the 
beloved John and commends him to His 
mother. Where is there finer, truer love and 
devotion, aye, devotion that to us is utterly 
inexplicable, than that which He shows to 
His faithless disciple, Peter, on the night that 
he denied Him ? Even Judas, faithless friend 
and betrayer that he is, receives no other 
word of condemnation than this : " Betrayest 
thou the Son of Man with a kiss?" No 



90 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

matter what the shifting action of fickle men 
may disclose, the friendship of the Master 
knows no change. 

After His resurrection and His meeting with 
the disciples, there is no word spoken in con- 
demnation of their apostasy ; to the absent and 
doubting Thomas, He comes with a special mes- 
sage of revelation. Few incidents are more 
tender than His address to this sceptic, " reach 
hither thy hand and thrust it into My side, and 
be not faithless, but believing." True friend- 
ship finds its perfect exemplar here ; nothing 
can disturb it, nothing can alter its devotion ; it 
knows no changing circumstances, the flight 
of years serves but to quicken its impulse, the 
depth of suffering tends but to increase its 
love. If we had never known other than the 
story of this faultless love, we should feel that 
in the Master the world had discovered its 
highest and noblest friend. It is this con- 
secutive, unalterable attachment of Christ for 
His disciples, that makes us realize the scope 
and depth of His sympathy for us. It is in 
the role that we love most and that we most 
need, that He comes to our life to-day. Not 
alone as its great Teacher, not alone as its 



JESUS 0HEI8T — THE FRIEND 91 

masterful Leader does Jesus Christ come to 
His world now, but He comes as its dearest, 
truest and most incomparable Friend. He 
enters within the inner circle of our life, 
touching its every experience with the warm 
glow of His deep love, lightening its burdens 
and making possible its higher accomplish- 
ments. 

To effect a Brotherhood of sympathetic in- 
terests throughout the world, to bind together 
in closer union the scattered tribes of men, 
to emphasize the solidarity of the race, to 
make Himself the meeting place for all classes 
and kinds, this was the absorbing work of the 
Christ. 

A large inclusiveness characterized His every 
attitude and utterance; a world of friends, 
this is the dream of the millennium, aye, it is 
the prophecy of that life that, on the cross, 
saw in the coming ages the fulfilment of its 
vast designs and over a consummated world- 
redemption cried, " It is finished." To hasten 
the reign of this Master of men means to 
hasten that day, 

** When man to man, the world o'er 
Shall brothers be, for a' that," 



JESUS CHKIST— THE LIBERATOR 



JESUS CHRIST— THE LIBERATOR 

** Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you 
free."— St. John 8 : 32. 

** I am come that they might have life, and that they might 
have it more abundantly.'^ — St. John 10 : 10. 

FEW statements that fell from the lips of 
France's great poet and writer, Victor 
Hugo, are more suggestive or significant 
than these : " The first tree of liberty was 
planted eighteen centuries ago by God Himself 
on Golgotha. The first tree of liberty was 
that cross on which Jesus Christ was offered 
a sacrifice, for the liberty, equality and frater- 
nity of the human race." That Jesus Christ 
should be accorded a place among the eman- 
cipators of men, may, on first consideration 
seem strange, but we venture the statement, 
that in no aspect of His life, other than that of 
His Saviourhood (and even here this aspect of 
His great life demands deep consideration), 
does He come so close to the heart of humanity, 
as in the role of the world's Liberator. That 
Christ did seek to bring to life something more 

95 



96 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

than the hope of an immortal existence, that He 
did seek to disclose something more than the 
way that leadeth up to Life eternal, we conceive 
to be evident in His every act and utterance. 
His great philosophy contemplates something 
more than a future state of bliss and seeks to 
lend to present environment and conditions of 
being, that which has to do with the better- 
ment and larger liberty of the race. For gen- 
erations, the theologians and interpreters of the 
Master's life have sought to lay all emphasis 
upon His regenerating work as it affects man's 
future existence ; there has been little in all 
their teaching that related Christ to the things 
that concern men in the great struggle for ex- 
istence here and now. This, we believe, more 
than all else, has put the Master so far away 
from the vision of men, that much of our pres- 
ent day indifference is the result. In the 
philosophy or theology of this great school of 
interpreters, there was no effort put forth to 
assert the wholeness of truth concerning Him, 
nor to emphasize the intimacy of His relation 
to those commoner interests of men in the 
every-day experiences of life. 

It was this remote, and if we may venture 



JESUS CHRIST — THE LIBERATOR 97 

the phrase, this non-human God, that prompted 
Carlyle to call Him, the "absentee God." It 
was more of the God of Sinai and less of the 
God of Calvary, more of the God of judgment 
and less of the God of mercy ; more of the God 
who ruled in some far-away and remote sphere 
and less of an ever present and immanent God, 
who marks the movement of life, from the 
cradle to the grave. With such a conception, 
it is little wonder that in due time the church 
and her accredited teachers came to lose much 
of their power, for they had violated the very 
fundamental principle of the incarnation. We 
venture the assertion, that it is the later and 
larger teaching concerning the place of Christ 
in His world, and the closer identification of 
human interests with those of the Divine, that 
is to spell out in the future, a saner, better and 
more effective religious habit of thought and 
life among the people. That Jesus Christ is 
the Liberator of men, that He has touched 
with His divine hand the chain that bound 
them to a past full of crude and arbitrary con- 
ceptions of God and of life's obligations, is 
witnessed to in every utterance and attitude 
of His perfect life. Coming as He did, at a 



98 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

time when His own people were under the 
hard yoke of their Roman taskmasters ; coming 
as He did, at a time when so much of the 
beauty and refinement of life had been dis- 
possessed by the usurpations of an autocratic 
and despotic power, there is something singu- 
larly fascinating in this conception of Him as 
the Liberator of men. What an immense 
reach it is from this simple Christ of Galilee, 
announcing the vastness of His claims, but 
seeking their accomplishment through the win- 
someness of His gracious love, to an Augustus 
seated on his imperial throne at Rome and 
claiming the sovereignty of the world. What a 
suggestive line of thought we develop when 
we undertake to institute a comparison be- 
tween this humble Master of men and those 
who by might of conquest left for the brief 
space of a few years their impress on the 
world. It is little wonder that, in one of 
those saner moments that came to him in 
later life. Napoleon recognized the majesty of 
this Christ and the enduring influence of His 
sceptre throughout the world. 

We believe that in three conspicuous ways 
Christ witnesses to this high place of leader- 



JESUS CHRIST — THE LIBERATOR 99 

sbip as the Liberator of men. That in many 
other ways He exercises this emancipating 
power is obvious, but here in these three de- 
partments of human life His sovereignty is 
complete. 

First, He is the Liberator of men from the 
thraldom of human philosophies. 

Again, He is the Liberator of men from the 
thraldom of fear. 

And finally, He is the Liberator of men from 
the thraldom of sin. 

St. Paul declares, that the law came by 
Moses, but grace and truth by Jesus Christ, 
and in this he enunciates what appears to us 
to be, a basis principle of the Incarnation. 
That the world at the coming of Christ was 
rich in its philosophies and that it had many 
noble and inspiring religious systems, no one 
would venture for an instant to dispute. The 
very people to whom He came, the Jews, had 
a system rich with the accretions of the ages 
and splendid with the history of an incompa- 
rable service. But, notwithstanding all this, 
these people had lost the genius of a true and 
deep religious faith ; they had substituted the 
commandments of men for the doctrines of 
t. Of C. 



100 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

God. They were seeking to satisfy themselves 
with mere externals, the traditions and cus- 
toms of their fathers. Boasting of their noble 
lineage, they were the witnesses of their own 
degeneracy. Building the tombs of the proph- 
ets, they were the rebellious children of their 
murderers ; — they were full of " all manner of 
uncleanness." 

The finer genius of Greek philosophy full of 
a noble spiritual quality had felt the defacing 
and destroying touch of a grosser materialism, 
and the domination of a despotic Eoman Em- 
pire, whose lust for power had awed the 
world, rendered this ancient dynasty impotent 
to develop the truer and nobler qualities of 
life. Into all this life of antagonism, Christ 
came ; He found the world through which He 
moved, a world of slavery, where the full, free 
exercise of thought was restrained, if not 
wholly forbidden. Men had come to think 
that the day would never dawn when they 
should be freed from a yoke, even more gall- 
ing than that of the stern Roman Empire. It 
was the yoke, under which so many nations 
have chafed, the yoke of an enforced intellec- 
tual paralysis : a state or condition of being 



JESUS CHEIST — ^THE LIBERATOR 101 

more destructive of all that makes for the best 
and truest in life, than that of physical servi- 
tude. 

A shackled mind, a restrained aspiration, a 
forsaken hope, these are the root causes of the 
world's bitterness. Though a man experience 
impairment of physical sight as did Milton, 
if his mind be left free, he will catch visions 
of an Eternal City and enrich his race with his 
genius. Again, confine him within the narrow 
limitations of a Bedford prison, where the sun- 
light never penetrates, and his mind will roam 
at will over the broad world, like some pilgrim 
in quest of the soul's triumph. 

Or once more, deaden his ear to the message 
of the human voice and to the " concord of 
sweet sound," and he will catch from distant 
spheres their music and translate it to his won- 
dering fellows. When Jesus came to His own 
people, their Davids and Solomons and Isaiahs 
had long since ceased to be. From a period 
rich with poetry and pregnant with splendid 
philosophy, they had come to a condition of 
mediocrity and degeneracy ; and what was true 
here, was largely true of Eome and Athens ; 
the Delphic Oracle had lost the heeding ear of 



102 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

the people and high Olympus was forsaken. 
Physical power, the aggrandizement of the 
state, the enthronement of the baser elements 
of life, the neglect of the altars of service and 
high consecration, these were the marks of the 
time. Even the philosophies, splendid as many 
of them were, had ceased to be operative ; as 
organs for moral regeneration or as means to a 
permanent spiritual development they had 
signally failed. " Where there is no vision the 
people perish " is a truism that never loses its 
deep meaning. Paul's experience with the 
scholars of Athens on Mars Hill, is singularly 
suggestive of the degenerate tendency of the 
period. It was into this condition, that 
marked what the sacred chronicler describes as 
" the fulness of time," that Jesus Christ came 
with His great word, " Ye shall know the 
truth and the truth shall make you free." 

A " fulness of time " indeed, but one that 
bore witness to a fulness of need rather than 
to a fulness of accomplishment. To a world 
bound by tradition and custom to systems 
that had long since lost their virtue and power, 
the Christ came, bringing in His train the life 
abundant. He brought the only thing that 



JESUS CHRIST — THE LIBERATOR 103 

could make men free, truth, the great eman- 
cipating power in human life. Never before 
in the history of men, had truth prevailed 
with such regenerating and rejuvenating force, 
as at the lips of the Master Man. He was the 
Liberator of men from the thraldom of their 
false systems and philosophies. From the 
shackles that bound them, Christ set men free. 
From the slavery of human infirmities as they 
found expression in these religious systems. 
He gave to men the freedom which a divine 
truth insures. How this divine truth has been 
working through the long ages, travailing to 
its larger birth, let the ever advancing steps 
of a finer and truer civilization declare : what 
it has done for the bettering of human institu- 
tions, what it has done for the amelioration of 
the sufferings of men, what it has done for the 
elevation of womanhood and the protection of 
childhood; aye, what it has done for the 
world's genius in its every form and expres- 
sion, let the certain voice of history repeat. 
Reckoning Christ by the low standards of 
human achievement. His work as a Liberator 
of the human mind places Him far in advance 
of the world's most splendid teachers and 



104 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

philosophers. From the slavery of a half 
truth, He has brought the world to the real- 
ization of the whole truth ; from the kinder- 
garten period of religious development He has 
brought it to the larger and more advanced 
grades of spiritual achievement. Conceive of 
the vast work which this Liberator has 
wrought in the dark places of the earth, of 
the conquests He has made of superstition and 
idolatry, of the leavening of the habitations of 
cruelty by the gentle spirit of His overmas- 
tering love, and we get but a faint conception 
of the magnitude of His emancipation work. 
On and on this work has gone, hindered often- 
times by the weakness of human interpreta- 
tion, restrained in its free course for a brief 
period by the cupidity or selfishness of its ac- 
credited exponents, but ever onward it has 
moved, reaching out to the remotest bound- 
aries and making even the islands of the sea 
resplendent with its life-renewing touch : yes, 
the Liberator of men is abroad in His world, 
and never more completely has He dominated 
it than in this newer and later age. Through 
Him it is to come to its largest and noblest 
fulfilment and by His power and might it is to 



JESUS CHRIST— THE LIBERATOR 105 

reach out and up until it lays its trembling 
hands on the opening gates of His eternal 
City. 

Again, Christ is the Liberator of men from 
the slavery of fear. The great Apostle to the 
Gentiles speaks of those who are all their life- 
time subject to bondage through fear. The 
influence of fear-thought upon life is so evi- 
dent as to need no demonstration here. From 
the earliest dawn down to the latest sunset, 
fear exercises a potent sway over life. 

When Jesus Christ stated the supervising 
care of God over human life, when He empha- 
sized the particularizing watchfulness of a love 
that is sensitive to the every need of our being 
in its largest and best development, yes, 
when He linked the wants of humanity with 
the answering love of divinity and so corre- 
lated the two. He gave to human desire a new 
impulse and to human want a new satisfac- 
tion. Free men from the burdening anxiety 
of a doubtful present and an unknown future, 
give to every day an objective and to time a 
destiny possible of attainment, and you have 
plucked the thorn from life's pathway and for 
foreboding fear substituted triumphant hope. 



106 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

A life full of fear is a life full of weakness. 
Jesus Christ, like a great physician, placed His 
strong hand upon the pulse of humanity and 
gave assurance of a new day of larger and 
better life. What He gave to the man who 
had lain for eight and thirty years by the 
Pool of Bethesda, waiting in vain for the 
touch of the healing waters. He gives to every 
child of earth, if he will but receive it. Not 
the energy to linger longer by the miraculous 
spring, nor yet the power to step down for 
the waters' renewing touch ; but a new energy 
to move away from the old environment of 
failure and weakness, out into the new country 
of a larger and better endeavor. To the nerve- 
less arm He gave the thrill of His own divine 
energy ; to the sightless eye, the illumination 
of His own divine vision ; to the deaf ear, a 
newer and clearer avenue to the soul pene- 
trated by His own divine voice ; and to the 
impotent and paralyzed body, the irresistible 
power of His own perfect manhood. Yes, 
Jesus Christ dispossessed fear and in its stead 
placed a reassuring and triumphant hope. 
To teach men concerning their daily needs, 
that their Heavenly Father was conscious of 



JESUS CHRIST — THE LIBERATOR 107 

their requirements, and was " touched Avith 
the feeling " of their infirmities, that He was 
not an " absentee God," meant to rob them of 
the blight of anxiety and to assure them of 
the sovereign care and love of their great 
Father. 

Again, it was to teach them that the sunset 
of life was but the later glow of a larger fulfil- 
ment, and that the night, however dark, was 
but the precursor of a fairer and brighter 
morning. All this was designed to give peace 
where care had been, and to make every dis- 
cipline a new teacher to bring men nearer to 
the Father's home. To lie down in quiet 
slumber and to awake again to the clear call 
of the watchman, — " All is well," and then to 
know that after seas are over and the haven 
reached, we shall 

** See our Pilot face to face ; *' 

this means to lend to life the transfiguring 
power of Him who said, " I am come that they 
might have life, and that they might have it 
more abundantly." 

Upon such an assurance, the very sting of 
death is drawn, and the gates of a new life, 



108 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

without fear, swing open wide to every tired 
pilgrim, of earth. 

And finally, Jesus Christ freed men from 
the thraldom of sin. This was the proud 
boast of St. Paul after his own emancipation : 
he was freer even in his chains as Nero's 
prisoner, than the Eoman guard who watched 
at his side ; yes, freer than the proud Emperor 
seated on his throne. Alexander, master as 
he was of empires, was the slave and victim of 
his own sin which destroyed him. From a 
curse, more awful than that of bondmen, 
Jesus Christ came to set men free. To arouse 
the better nature so long dormant, to whisper 
in the ear of the despairing the word of a new 
hope; to tell men even in the face of every 
discouragement and failure, of the unfulfilled 
possibilities that lay before them, yes, to 
render the weakling strong to slay his Goliath 
of passion and lust, this was the conquering 
work of Jesus Christ. The story of the New 
Testament is the story of the conquest of sin 
and the reclamation of life : it is no mere re- 
cital of impossible characters seeking impossi- 
ble ends. The Christ knew what was in man ; 
He penetrated beneath his rough exterior and 



JESUS CHRIST— THE LIBERATOR 109 

disclosed the latent capacities within. Not 
with an eye of doubt and fear, but with an 
eye of hope and encouragement He called 
forth from the selfish and brutal Saul the 
mighty and aggressive Paul. Again, He re- 
created a band of faithless and apostate dis- 
ciples, and made of them a body of invincible 
might and energy. A fallen and deserted 
creature. He lifted from the degradation of 
deepest despair and gave to her the rejuve- 
nating power of a wholesome and restored 
life. The operation of this emancipating 
power, is the mightiest miracle of the New 
Testament, as it is the greatest gift of the 
divine Saviour. What it has done for the race 
in bringing it to a larger and fuller life, every 
forward movement triumphantly proclaims. 
Step by step, man has come under this inspir- 
ing and regenerating influence and been 
brought to know his high sovereignty over his 
own nature. On the throne of the will, where 
once a weak and vacillating volition was 
seated, is enthroned a supreme and masterful 
power. 

From the serfdom of yielding passion, we 
have, through Christ the Liberator, come to 



110 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

the large freedom of the more abundant life. 
So strong is this Christ-emancipated man, that 
the combined forces of evil cannot overthrow 
him. In the fulness of his conscious power, 
he walks as a freedman in the courts of earth 
and comes at length to be a prince in the 
higher courts of heaven. The identification 
of God in Christ with the life of humanity is 
the fulfilled dream of the ages ; but the eman- 
cipating power of the Master, freeing His 
children from a bondage too heavy to be 
borne and giving them the larger liberty of 
the sons of God, is the culminating ideal of 
the incarnation. That this Saviour of men is 
abroad in His world to-day, and that His 
touch is on the hearts of men as never before, 
we believe to be demonstrably true. As the 
world's great Liberator, He is to come at 
length to His place of complete supremacy 
and lift humanity up to the heights of an at- 
tainment where it shall be more completely a 
partaker of the divine nature. 



JESUS CHRIST— THE SAVIOUE 



** The relegation of life to some distant future, and the 
separation of the holy man from the virtuous man, are the 
signs of a false religious conception.'^ — Amiel, 

*' The Gospel is no mere book, but a living creature, with 
a vigor, a power which conquers all that opposes it. The 
soul, charmed with the beauty of the Gospel, is no longer its 
own. God possesses it entirely ; He directs its thought 
and faculties ; it is His :— what a proof of the divinity of 
Christ. He is a conqueror who draws men to Himself for 
their highest good ; who unites to Himself, incorporates into 
Himself, not a nation, but the whole human race.'^ 

— Napoleon, 

*'The more abundant life, the life full of completion 
haunts us all, we feel the thing we ought to be beating 
beneath the thing we are.'' — PJdlUps Brooks. 

*' Jesus Christ is the greatest name in history. There are 
others for which men have died. His is the only one wor- 
shiped among all peoples of aD races in all ages." 

— Fdre Didon. 



JESUS CHRIST— THE SAVIOUR 

*' There is none other name under heaven given among 
men whereby we must be saved/' — Acts 4 : 12. 

*' This is indeed the Christ,— the Saviour of the world/' — 
St. John 4 ; 42. 

THERE are many names or designa- 
tions of Christ that give Him the 
high place of distinction in certain 
spheres of action, but none is so universal or 
comprehensive as this one, — Jesus Christ, the 
Saviour of the world. Thus to characterize 
Him, IS to admit His divinity, for so extensive 
and sublime an accomplishment must imply 
something more than that which human genius 
can furnish. No man has ever essayed to be 
more than the saviour of a race or of a nation 
of men ; no one has ever undertaken to play 
the role of the world's Redeemer, saving Jesus 
of Nazareth. Dealing as He does with every 
interest of life in its present environment and 
condition, Jesus again and again declares His 
power to save the world universal. As a Jew- 
ish Teacher and Reformer, as the creator of a 
113 



114 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

sect or party, He displays a marvelous genius 
and power ; but not in any or all of these 
aspects of His life, does He engage the atten- 
tion of the world, as its Saviour. The declara- 
tions He makes concerning His oneness with 
the Father, may be but the expression of a 
deeper and fuller consciousness of the indwell- 
ing of that divinity of which every man is a 
partaker; but His declarations, wherein He 
expressly states His control over all life, these 
are the positive tokens of His divinity. 

How can we understand such an utterance 
as, " I give unto them eternal life," by any 
other standard than that of His Godhead ? 
What boldness, nay, what seeming audacity 
and unwarranted authority do these and other 
words of His imply, when we seek to measure 
Him by the standards of human greatness and 
power. Jesus is never so completely divine, 
He is never so truly majestic, as when He 
thus declares the limitless extent of His power. 
We have often tried to imagine Him as nothing 
more than the greater embodiment and ex- 
pression of the eternal Father's mind and heart, 
the express image of His person ; the highest 
type of the realized perfect man : but we have 



JESUS CHRIST — THE SAVIOUR 115 

been embarrassed when we came to these 
strange and awful utterances of His that de- 
clare in such positive ways His mastership 
over all life. If Jesus is but a perfect type of 
life, if He is but a great teacher who is to be 
classified with other great exponents and ex- 
pounders of truth ; nay, if He is but a Ee- 
deemer and Eestorer of the truer and the 
better life in this present world, then there is 
a confusion and a difficulty in many of His ut- 
terances that render Him utterly beyond our 
comprehension and adoration. Either Jesus 
Christ is what, in His greater utterances He 
declared Himself to be, or else there is an in- 
congruity and inconsistency in His whole 
philosophy. It was a strange position which 
the French encyclopedists took, when they 
gave Christ such an exalted place, such an 
incomparable distinction among all the world's 
teachers and philosophers, and yet denied 
to Him His essential characteristic, namely. His 
divinity. To call Him the " divinest symbol 
of perfection," or the " holiest of men," and to 
acknowledge His supreme place among all the 
great leaders of thought, is not sufficient. If 
He "lifted the gates of empire from their 



116 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

hinges, and turned the streams of centuries 
from their courses," then He did it, not because 
He was supremely human, but because He was 
eternally divine. 

Jesus announced Himself to be the world's 
Saviour, He emphatically stated that in Him- 
self were to be found the healing palliatives 
for the world's ills. It was not to usher in 
some new and original philosophy, or to create 
some new cult, that engaged the thought of 
this Master-man. He bent every energy of 
His divine life to the one great end of saving 
humanity. He was not some Hebrew Messiah 
seeking the restoration of an ancient kingdom ; 
He was not some Liberator come to unshackle 
an enslaved race ; He was a world Redeemer, 
whose message and whose work had to do 
with all forms and phases of life the world 
over. Saviourhood implies divinity. Even the 
distinguished Unitarian, Dr. Channing, is com- 
pelled to break for the time with his church's 
doctrine where he says : " I confess when I es- 
cape the deadening power of habit, and can 
receive the full import of such passages as 
the following : ' Come unto Me, all ye that 
labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you 



JESUS CHRIST— THE SAVIOUR 117 

rest ' : 'I am come to seek and to save that 
which was lost : ' ^ In My Father's house are 
many mansions, I go to prepare a place for you : ' 
I say, when I can succeed in realizing the import 
of such passages, I feel myself listening to a 
being such as never before and never since 
spoke in human language. I am awed by the 
consciousness of greatness which these simple 
words express ; and when I connect this great- 
ness with the proofs of Christ's miracles, I am 
compelled to speak with the centurion, * truly 
this was the Son of God.' " Says the late Dean 
Liddon, " if Jesus Christ is not God, can we 
even say that He is sincere ? " And then he 
goes on to indicate what must have been the 
awful consciousness of this Perfect Man when 
the fact of an evident imposture dawned upon 
Him. Even Kousseau is compelled to declare 
his deeper conviction, in his estimate of Christ : 
" If the life and death of Socrates," said he, " be 
those of a sage, the life and death of Jesus 
Christ are those of a God." 

Comparing the Master with all the great 
leaders of time. Napoleon concluded his sum- 
mary with those ever memorable words, which 
the French preacher Lacordaire said ought to 



118 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

be carved upon his tomb : " In fine, I know 
men, and I say that Jesus Christ was not a 
man." 

It is a striking but incontrovertible fact that, 
whenever an assault has been made upon the 
citadel of Christian faith and the doctrine of 
Christ's Saviourhood attacked, among its con- 
spicuous and faithful defenders have been 
these very men who under other conditions 
rendered no allegiance to His claims. The 
world will not long tolerate any exposition 
that treats with flippant unconcern the right- 
ful preeminence of the Master, nor will it have 
any substitute for this Divine Leader. Ten- 
nyson expressed the deep conviction of hu- 
manity in his lines : 

**Thon seemest human and divine, 

The highest, holiest manhood Thou ; 

Our wills are ours, we know not why, 

Our wills are ours, to make them Thine." 

Complicated and complex as much of our 
theological teaching may be, remote as we 
have made Christ from the intelligence of 
men, one thing we may not and cannot do, 
separate Him from those interests that relate 
Him to man's salvation. Jesus positively de- 



JESUS CHRIST — THE SAVIOUR 119 

clared Himself to be the Saviour of men, and 
His whole life is in demonstration of this 
declaration. 

" Whosoever believeth on Me hath everlast- 
ing life." "I give unto them eternal life; 
and they shall never perish, neither shall any 
man pluck them out of My hand." Not only 
to give to men a new and finer system of 
philosophy setting forth the relations between 
man and man ; not only to set up some new 
system of statecraft, such as that which the 
great Chinese philosopher Confucius gave to 
his people; but to give them first and fore- 
most the guarantee of an eternal existence, 
this was the purpose of the advent of the Son 
of God. No matter what else Jesus of Naza- 
reth may or may not be, He is, by His own 
assertion, the Saviour of men. 

In Him the guesses of the ages find fulfil- 
ment ; in Him the dark riddles of the grave 
find their great and final answer. When Jesus 
hung upon the cross and closed His eyes in 
the sleep of death, the world passed into its 
eclipse and its sun was darkened. If ever 
defeat seemed more apparent than here, we 
have failed to disclose it ; but when after the 



120 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

brief space of three days He came forth from 
the tomb, the first-fruits of them that slept, 
the world passed out into its new morning of 
eternal sunshine. 

Over against a cross of defeat stands an 
open tomb of victory. That the new power 
of a resurrected Master dominated the early 
church and lent to it such courage and per- 
sistence that it triumphed over every difficulty, 
is the testimony of contemporaneous history. 
Men that were hitherto weak and vacillating 
were made strong and valiant ; an energy that 
even the most critical and skeptical must 
recognize, effected results that every historian 
from that day to this has taken cognizance of 
and recorded. Leckey declares that some new 
and singular power, indefinable in its scope 
and character entered into human life at this 
time and lent to it an irresistible impulse. It 
was the power of His Saviourhood. 

Jesus came to give to life here a new aspect 
and to furnish it with a new motive, but He 
effected this by enduing it with a new power, 
the power of an endless life. He rendered the 
present more fascinating and inspiring by in- 
suring the permanence of being. The immor- 



JESUS CHRIST — THE SAVIOUR 121 

tality of genius received its warrant at the 
hands of this risen Christ. If life is influenced 
by its environment and antecedent conditions, 
then it is influenced still more largely by that 
to which it aspires. We are like the thing we 
seek — determine the destination, the great ob- 
jective of life, and we determine the method 
of accomplishing it. Fix life's ideals, and we set 
in motion the means to attain them. Measure 
its span by some human standards, where its 
rising and its setting are determined by the 
rising and the setting sun, and its aims will be 
those that find their realization within the 
compass of time. 

Again, measure life by the standards fixed 
by the world's Eedeemer, and we find its aims 
reaching out beyond the outmost boundaries 
of time and sense. Before the Master gave to 
human life its new aspect, it was wholly occu- 
pied with things transient, after He touched 
it with His own renewing power, its consum- 
ing desire was to pursue the things eternal. 

He satisfied the deepest hunger and yearn- 
ing of the human heart, for 

** 'Tis life whereof our souls are scant, 
More life and fuller that we want.'' 



122 THE MAN AND THE MASTEE 

To study and to think and to plan and to 
work as those Avho have the assurance of the 
larger life, lightens life's burdens and furnishes 
an inspiration to all endeavor. To know that 
days and years are but the designations of a 
limited present and the precursors of an un- 
limited future, where all that we are or hope 
to be shall burst into flower, illuminates the 
darkest night and lends a peculiar charm to 
the most burdensome task. 

From dawn to sunset we cry for more life, 
and the only voice that has spoken with au- 
thority and assurance concerning this desire, 
is the voice of Him who said, '' Because I live, 
ye shall live also." Here, in the presence of 
this Saviour of men, honest doubt submits it- 
self to Him, 

"Believing where it cannot prove/' 

But quite aside from these renewing touches 
which He gave to life, we believe He made it 
more resplendent in its living. Say what we 
may, there is a something which the conscious- 
ness of His Saviourhood lends to life that is 
utterly beyond our capacity to analyze. To 
feel and know that through Him we are in 



JESUS CHRIST— THE SAVIOUR 123 

some way related to the eternal, that the 
things about us spell out the unending lesson 
of His love, that every flower that greets us 
on our pilgrimage is charged with a message 
from Him ; that every star swinging in space 
reflects the eternal light of His presence, this 
is to enrich and beautify life and to exalt it, 
till its every breath drinks in the purer airs of 
heaven. Is not this the larger meaning of the 
more abundant life ? Is there anything that 
can compare even remotely with the thought 
taught by His great life, namely, that with 
Him we are even now partakers of the Father's 
bounty ? To believe in Christ's Saviourhood 
and then to live a life tinctured with bitter- 
ness, to catch a glimpse of His sunshine and 
then to look only for clouds, to see the beauty 
of His smile and then to be ever frowning, is 
a mockery and a delusion. A world of men 
and women with the first glow of the eternal 
life upon them, upon whose faces there can be 
no shadow of departing day, this is the design 
and eternal purpose of His blessed ministry. 
Christ's Saviourhood is one that has to do, not 
with graves and tombs, but with the habita- 
tions of the living ; He begins His divine proc- 



124 THE MAN AIS-D THE MASTER 

esses here, and then amplifies them hereafter. 
He is not alone the Master waiting at the end 
of the road and at the close of the day to give 
the word of " well done," or the reward of 
faithful service ; — He is ever with us on the 
pilgrimage, speaking to us again and again the 
word of good cheer and encouragement. 
What a monstrous conception was that which 
made this Saviour a sort of hard and exacting 
Taskmaster, meting out to the wicked or un- 
fortunate, the awful penalties for their indis- 
cretions, and giving only to a few of the more 
favored and less tempted, the rewards of His 
eternal bliss. No, this is not the Christ of the 
Evangel, it is a caricature of His blessed 
person. 

Jesus Christ is the Saviour of all life ; the 
benison of His peace is found at every turning 
of the way. To possess this precious boon is the 
privilege of all who will but seek for His pres- 
ence on the great highways of life. And 
what of the future does this gracious life re- 
veal ? Simply and yet profoundly this : " I am 
the Way and the Truth and the Life, no man 
cometh unto the Father but by Me." To open 
the way that leadeth up to life eternal, to 



JESUS CHRIST — THE SAVIOUR 125 

make it so plain that the simplest may find it ; 
was not this the final end and aim of the min- 
istry of this man of Nazareth ? To soften the 
hard pillow of a deep and shadowy night with 
the promise of a sure and glorious to-morrow, 
was not this the assurance and guarantee He 
came to give ? Did He not treat this enigma 
of time as one who spoke out of the sure 
ground of certitude ? 

Is there not an inspiration which His Saviour- 
hood lends to the gloom and sorrow of the 
tomb ? What a vesture of light He throws 
about death and the grave. 

The effect of this saving power of Christ 
upon life, we cannot even faintly conjecture. 
He is not the Saviour of a State or of a race, 
but of the individual. His whole ministry was 
largely with the individual, as if to emphasize 
the personal element in His saving power. 

What would it mean to bring this saving 
Christ down into the purlieus and dark 
lanes and alleys of our great centres of popula- 
tion ? What would it mean to have the 
pierced hand of this Master laid upon those 
throbbing centres of intense life where men and 
women are contending for the ephemeral things 



126 THE MAN AND THE MASTER 

that perish with the using ? What a process 
of renovation it would mean ; what a renewal 
of life and hope it would yield. What this old 
world is sighing for to-day, what it has ever 
sighed for, is the presence of its Saviour. The 
consciousness with which the dying Tennyson 
went out with the certainty of meeting his 
Pilot face to face when he had crossed the bar, 
this we say is the longing desire of every 
human heart in its deeper musings and yearn- 
ings. We are all waiting for those renewals 
of life that make every morning speak of that 
final and eternal day, when the sun shall never 
set. We are all pushing on and up to those 
heights where we catch the broader sweep of 
view and see those happy vales that are fairer 
than those the poet dreams of in his storied 
Elysium. To know there is an eye will mark 
our coming and a hand will reach to greet us, 
what a glow this lends to all the tasks and 
disappointments of life. The dullest mortal 
that lives feels the new pulsings of a power that 
flows from the life of the Saviour Christ, and 
looking up out of his narrow and limited 
sphere of action, stretches forth his palm to re- 
ceive the gift He brings. The man at his 



JESUS CHRIST — THE SAVIOUR 127 

tasks, overburdened with care and bowing be- 
neath the load, hears the message of this 
Saviour of men, and stiffening his back to the 
burden, presses on in the hope of a newer and 
brighter day : the mourner in his deep and aw- 
ful sorrow, sees only the wreck of his hopes 
and the ruin of his fairest desires, but when he 
hears the word of divine triumph fall from the 
lips of the risen Saviour, lifts his head above 
the lowering clouds to greet the sun. All life 
finds its best illumination and transfigurement 
at the feet of its mighty Master. The work- 
man, the teacher, the reformer, the friend; 
yes, in all these aspects of His transcendent 
life, He is spelling out the deep and subtle 
meaning of His wondrous message : but in no 
aspect of His sacred life is He more appealing 
or triumphant, than in that of the world's 
Saviour. 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: July 2005 

PreservatlonTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



lilillli 









!lllllHiililll!l!lllli!lli!'.'iiii 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



I 







,1 ^ 



lilllP^ 



11 



,i!i;iii|;|ll|l!f 



014 225 989 8 



"i"l IrJlHi 



lliiiiii 
iifti ill 



'lllllltlllllmilfilll 



1 i. 



iiili 



iiiiiii 



i'i';\'-i 



